Re: Opening new tabs in existing instance

[Kai <kai willadsen gmail com>]

On 14 October 2011 22:02, Magnus Ihse Bursie
<magnus ihse bursie oracle com> wrote:
> One thing I miss much in meld is the ability to open new tabs in an existing
> instance. Some example use cases:
>
> * When working with Perforce (p4) source control, diffing a changelist
> results in a call to the diff tool for each file included. This gives me a
> multitude of meld windows, instead of a single window with many tabs. The
> latter behaviour was possible on Araxis Merge, which I used before, and was
> very satisfied with.

Not saying that we shouldn't have a way to open new tabs from the
command line - we probably should - but the problem here would seem to
be that we don't have p4 support in Meld. Otherwise, you'd get a VC
view. There *was* a p4 backend written
(https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=530444), but that was
before my time. Not being a p4 user, I also can't really test it. If
you can get the patch to apply, try it out and comment!

> * I typically use geany as a text editor. When I want to edit a new file
> from the command line, I just type "geany myfile.c" and it gets opened in a
> new tab, and the spawning geany process immediatly terminates and returns me
> to the command line. The closest thing I can get in meld is by using "meld
> myfile1.c myfile2.c &", but that still leaves some debug output on my
> terminal. Also, if I kill the shell the meld windows gets lost.

I haven't tested, but I don't think this patch solves that issue. Meld
- for better or worse - has typically unix-y behaviour here. Detaching
from the terminal would, as far as I know, also kill several
merge-style workflows.

> When I started investigating this, I found out that a patch to fix this has
> already been written, but never been included. See
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=453670. It's a bit old, and I'm
> not sure if it works in a current meld.

>From a very quick look, there's no way that will apply, but I think it
can probably be made to work.

> It seems that meld development activity has gone up somewhat lately.

Unfortunately, I've actually had less time to spend on it, not more.
However, I'm very willing to look at patches and such.

> What
> are the chances that such a patch would get included? If the chances are
> high enough, I'm more than willing to fix the patch so it works on the
> current source base.

The chances that something similar to that patch would get in are
good, but the approach is overly-simplistic. For example, I know
people with workflows that require multiple Meld windows, and that
patch would break those. Off the top of my head, I think we'd at least
need support for a command-line choice between opening new tabs and
starting a new process.

More generally speaking, we definitely want some kind of dbus
interface. Getting that code working is also relatively simple.
However, any interface we add would risk becoming an ABI that we'd
have to maintain, so it would be good to get it right.

cheers,
Kai