Re: [gtk-list] Re: GtkText

["Neil Hodgson" <neilh hare net au>]

Andy Kahn comments:
> On Wed, Dec 15, 1999 at 11:42:41PM +1100, Neil Hodgson wrote:
> > ...
>
> Unfortunately, the first two are still based on the original GTK text
> widget, so they also inherit all the problems associated with it.  The
> last one (Scintilla), is written in C++ and in it's current form, is
> more of an application as opposed to a reusable widget.

   I should have pointed out in my reply that I'm the main author of
Scintilla. Scintilla is a widget, although a fairly heavy weight widget.
Also included with Scintilla is a demonstration editor application called
SciTE.

   I don't see that Mikael Hermansson's GtkExText will continue to inherit
all the problems of the original GTK text widget as it looks as though he
intends to fix these problems.

   While there are lots of good things in Scintilla, there are also some
problems in using it in GTK+. As stated previously, it is written in C++
rather than GTK+'s preferred C. Scintilla is cross platform itself and so
does not closely follow GTK+ conventions in terms of API. Instead, it
exposes an API based on the text controls that come with Windows. With the
1.1 release, this API layer was abstracted out so that it can be replaced
with a more GTK+ friendly one in the future.

   Scintilla originated in my trying to coerce the Windows Richedit control
(a word processing control) into a source code editor within PythonWin. This
attempt convinced me that a source code editor should be fundamentally
different from a word processor with styling handled as a 'decoration' of
the document rather than as an intrinsic part of the document. I'd recommend
GTK+ have separate widgets for these purposes or at least separate modes on
one mega-widget.

   Scintilla as it currently stands is not a reasonable base for building a
word processor widget because of many limitations including a fixed line
height, and a limited number of styles.

Owen Talyor comments:
> 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.).

    Scintilla currently has enough internationalisation to handle Japanese
(and possibly other) DBCS files on Windows. Porting DBCS support to GTK+
would be quite easy although I'm not as motivated as I no longer have a
personal need for this. UCS2 support is intended for Scintilla and other
contributors are interested in doing this. Bidi writing is fairly messy and
not currently a goal.

   Neil