meld wishlist

["Stephen Kennedy" <stevek gnome org>]

Hi all,

I'm delighted to say there have been quite a few patches in the past
few months, probably
more than in all other years combined! I'd like to thank all who have
sent patches.

Anybody else with an idea for a tweak, jump in! Meld is still pretty
small and not very
complex. You'll almost certainly get a good return for time invested.

I say this because for me, meld is mostly complete - it does what I
want it to do and
I've gotten used to its quirks. A very large proportion of bugzilla
bugs are of the "quirk"
variety and unlikely to be addressed unless a patch is provided :)

For the record, I'd also like to set out some larger scale tasks which
I've always had
at the back of my mind. These are several areas where I knew meld was
weak through
accidents of bad design, missing api, language features and patience
respectively.
Now if I could only get a few weeks off ...



Move diff computation into a separate process.

Meld would talk to the diff server over a nonblocking unix socket.
This would eliminate
one of the biggest ui annoyances - the slow edit update. The server
could easily be
multithreaded without inducing threading complexity into the main meld
ui. Most of
this can be written without any knowledge of meld. Also, it could be
shared with all
other gui diff tools.



Use GtkUiManager

The UI was written for gtk 1.99 (!) and has not changed massively
since then. Changing
to UI manager would get rid of the clunky "double toolbar", remove
some redundant clutter
and allow some improvements like a menu for common preference settings
(tab size, filters, etc)
without having to go through the preferences dialog. Keyboard-abilty
is easier too.



Use a proper tasklets library.

Python2.5 gave us proper coroutines and a choice of tasklet libraries
which would make
the UI snappier. e.g. no more ui-blocking VC operations



Use real widgets for patching buttons.

I couldn't find a way to use real gtk widgets in the textview or
middle bar when scrolling
without running into performance problems. The hand drawn ones look
quite naff. Many
people don't even know they are clickable.



Happy hacking,
Stephen.