[Vala] A pragmatic combination of gedit plugins for Vala.

[Serge Hulne <serge hulne gmail com>]

Hi All,

I have been experimenting with Gedit plugins for Vala lately.

I have compared the latest version of vtg (vala programming toys for Gedit)
under Debian Sid (0.12 version) and the 0.10.2 which is available on Ubuntu
11.04 ("natty narwhal").

My conclusion is as follows:

They both work ok, and it makes sense to have the latest version in order to
follow the future developments, because vtg looks very promising.

However vtg as of the time of this writing is not a completely mature
product (although again very promising) and in particular the
"auto-complete" function sometimes chokes on variables whose declaration
make use of templates.



*A pragmatic Alchemy:
*
For the moment being the solution which seems to me to provide the most
extensive "auto-complete" function is the following:


   - Gedit (under Ubuntu 11.04),
   - vtg 0.10 (packaged fot Ubuntu 11.04)
   - valencia (which compiles under Ubuntu 11.04, provided that you update
   the versions of the dependencies in the Makefile to match the ones available
   on your system). It sometimes works where vtg fails to provide dot-complete
   for the methods of a given object.
   - Word completion (avoid to have to type the name of a variable,
   eliminates typos).


I am not trying to suggest that this is an optimal solution, is is merely a
hack, but it works for me and it is the best compromise I could come up with
so far.

I am sure that on the long run future versions of  vtg will be able to
provide a robust auto-complete function even for complex code on its own and
that this hack will become unnecessary.

Serge.