Re: [gedit-list] The plugin mentality

[Thomas Biggs <tnbiggs yahoo com>]

I get the core+plugin idea, but...

Just as seatbelts were once considered a luxury add-on (really!) and are now considered standard in cars, there are some really basic features that may have been considered extras 20 years ago, but are pretty much considered standard in all modern generic text editors today--and yet, amazingly, are missing from gedit.

To look at it from another angle, why not take cut-and-paste out of gedit, and require the user to add a plugin to have this 'feature'? Then the core of gedit would be even smaller and simpler. Isn't this the goal? But you wouldn't even consider it a text editor without search/replace or cut and paste. My argument is that it isn't really it a text editor if it doesn't have, for example, block cut-and-paste.

There's a difference between a few basic features and bloat. Yes you can go overboard with bloat, but you can also go overboard with 'basic'.

Maybe every few years we can look at a one or two of the most-downloaded-plugins and consider making them part of the editor, and save everyone a lot of unnecessary editor editing.

    -tom