Gedit lib-ification, or add higher level functionnalities in GtkSourceView

[Sébastien Wilmet <sebastien wilmet gmail com>]

Hello!

Writing an IDE with GTK+ and GtkSourceView involves a lot of work, and I think that a lot of Gedit custom widgets can be reused, like GeditDocument or GeditFileChooserDialog [1].

There are common features in all text editors that are not supported by GtkSourceView, and each IDE have its own implementations. It's a waste of effort I think.

IDE written in Qt use the KTextEditor API, implemented by Kate Part [2]. This library have higher level functionnalities than GtkSourceView.

So it would be nice to have some Gedit custom widgets in a library, or develop higher level functionnalities in GtkSourceView. What is the best idea?

Maybe you think that it's better to write a Gedit plugin than writing a new IDE. Indeed, for some small features like documents statistics it's better. But in some cases I think it's not a good idea. Good examples are Anjuta and Nemiver.

Since a higher level library than GtkSourceView doesn't exist yet, what is the best way to start a new IDE with the current situation?

[1] http://library.gnome.org/devel/gedit/unstable/

[2] http://api.kde.org/4.x-api/kdelibs-apidocs/interfaces/ktexteditor/html/index.html