Re: elastic tabstops implemented for GTK

["Nick Gravgaard" <me nickgravgaard com>]

On 29/08/2007, Alex Jones <alex weej com> wrote:
>
>  Hi again, Nick
>
>  On Fri, 2007-07-13 at 10:46 +0200, Nick Gravgaard wrote:
>  Thanks Alex,
>
> The proportional font stuff is really just a nice side effect - this
> idea has all sorts of nice implications. Off the top of my head,
> imagine a program like ls that outputs a list of directories and
> files. At the moment ls needs to be aware of the number of columns of
> the console to which it is writing, and then it inserts spaces and
> newlines to make things line up. Resizing the console has no effect on
> the layout. Now, I haven't gotten round to implementing word wrap yet,
> but imagine if ls output a simple tab delimited list of directories
> and files instead, and the console undertood elastic tabstops (with
> word wrap implemented). Resizing the console would work, as would
> proportional fonts. Also, imagine how much easier piping between
> programs becomes when simple tab delimited text streams works like
> this!
>
> There are many other potential uses too :)
>
> Nick
>
>
>  How is this coming along? Have you opened bugzilla issues on this yet? I
> really want to start using this!

I've been busy recently with other stuff, so at the moment I'm still
hacking my gedit patch to turn it into a plugin. Paolo Maggi (main
gedit developer) told me on the gedit list:

"In this way it will be easier for other people to experiment with your
idea and may be we could start including your plugin in gedit-plugins if
the other members of the gedit team agree."

See:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gedit-list/2007-July/msg00035.html

Does anyone know the process for getting the elastic tabstop
functionality into the official GTK branch?

Nick