> Sebastian, if you are motivated and have time to do some serious work on
mc, maybe we should talk about a vision first?
Thanks for the invite! Yes I'm motivated, I find it very entertaining to work on mc.
I wish someone had taken the time instead to integrate the Lua fork by
mooffie. Unfortunately he wasn't up to maintaining his work of a genius
(no kidding) and we don't have resources to take it over.
I think that he had one initial mistake, if I can say so – he scripted mc and not mcedit. I think that it's an editor that can gain most of a scripting engine, not a filemanager.
In as far as S-Lang scripting is concerned, it's definitively easy to bolt
it on, but I really wouldn't want to live with the resulting mess. Our
code base is already in a shape bad enough...
I have a very pleasant experience with S-Lang. I've ran my first script displaying a listbox from script after ~2 hours of hacking – thanks to Slirp, the S-Lang version of Swig. It works very, surprisingly well! And it has all the advanced features of Swig (take a look at examples/kitchensink/slirprc if you have time). It looks solid.
Basically, to simply export a function to S-Lang, all that is required is to run: slirp header.h, with the declaration in that file and to compile and link the resulting header_glue.c (that slirp automatically creates)!
What concerns me about S-Lang is that it's not an object oriented language and that it doesn't have a bool type. However, that might be a good thing, as the engine and the vision will be light thanks to this, maybe…
It doesn't make sense to me for you invest your valuable time only to get
your patches criticized or rejected or just rotting on the tracker without
any feedback. If we can agree on a direction, then I think it will be good
for all of us, if we can't - at least it will be good for you, because
then you can spare your time arguing with us and directly setup a fork
instead... :-)
Yes, I had such hunches too. So my intentions are:
– to make the gem, that mcedit is, more popular,
– to make it grow and flourish mainly by the light scripting engine, but also by regular C work (like e.g.: the tags objects in listboxes patch – really, I don't know how I was using the various Vim tags plugins for years, as it's the mcedit's way – a simple listbox (which can be just built in) – that is the right way to do tags :)
– then to utilize the scripting also in regular mc and see what ideas will come up.
I'm constantly having ideas on mcedit improvements. I'm saving them to a file… It had like 80 entries, but I've just accidentally deleted it hours ago via a miserable rm -f **/*.#* glob (it expands to all files, not just those with hash in them, so look out) :( however I have a backup that has ~50 entries, uf … So maybe I could do a wish list on the wiki out of it?
PS. This gives an idea for an improvement – a saving of the backup file to a predefined directory outside the current tree… Could be done as a script plugin, maybe.
--
Sincerely yours,
Yury V. Zaytsev
