Re: GtkText

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Bradford Hovinen <hovinen@udel.edu> writes:

> Hmmm... I just downloaded and took a look at Scintilla. It looks like its
> text edit widget is far in advance of GtkText in many ways (especially in
> that it supports horizontal scrolling). Since the Gtk+ project needs a new
> text edit widget, why not just take that, port it to C (shouldn't be too
> hard since all the Gtk+ stuff is written in C) and patch it into Gtk+ as a
> GtkText replacement? It would eliminate the necessity of reinventing the
> wheel by writing a new text edit widget from scratch. It still needs a bit
> of work, most noteably in the area of reducing flicker and improving
> selection support, but to do so would be far easier than a completely new
> widget.

Well, not to comment on the intrinsic merits of this project, but it
would not be a strong candidate for the standard GtkText widget rewrite,
because one of the goals of the GtkText widget rewrite is very strong
internationalization support (support for bidirectional writing, etc.).
And I basically expect that the widget will have to be written with
that in mind, and with that in mind, and with a tight integration with
the underlying i18n layers.

Its quite possible that it is not appropriate to use the same widget for
source code editing and for editing natural-language text - the requirements
for the two are quite divergent.

Regards,
                                        Owen