[Vala] The perfect Vala/GNOME IDE...

[Filip Lamparski <matka poohatka gmail com>]

Good day to you!

I hope you were not expecting an actual release? Because that would be just
silly. There is not a perfect IDE for GNOME stack AND Vala yet.
However, I'd like to share with you some features that I'd like to see in a
great IDE for Vala and GNOME libs.

* Proper Vala completion, IntelliSense-style
The best I've seen of that is the obnoxious ValaToys completion which did
not parse documentation comments and acquired symbols
only from opened files. What I'd like to see is a proper code completion
engine, with trees for most common VAPIs and option to add
more. Such trees should also contain documentation spinnets. I think
Eclipse has something along these lines for Java (never used
it though, I don't personally use Java). Also, why not go a step further,
and parse the doc-style comments for local symbols?
I'm referencing IntelliSense, because I dabbled in C# back in the day, and
I think Microsoft nailed this very well.

* Better UI designer
Glade is awesome as it is, but it could be so much more! Currently, Glade
does not have styling support, or a way to create your
own widgets other than "Add without toplevel". Additionally, Glade
integration in Anjuta is not that great, and adding custom widgets
to the palette requires root privileges which some people may not have.
(source:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/30496/how-to-add-a-pygtk-widget-to-the-glade-palette
)
The new UI designer should use GtkBuilder/Glade files, but have support for
local catalogues.

* Version Control support
Pretty self-explanatory. Fortunately, most IDEs have it.

* GResource and GSettings schema editor
You know what was awesome in .NET on Visual C#/Basic/C++/Whatever? The fact
that there was a resource editor and program
settings schema editor built into one. Now, GResource and GSettings are two
different things, so this may not work that way,
but designing these is a process that may benefit from a special tool.

* Proper Vala debugger
That one's important. I can technically debug with GDB, but it only gets me
so far. A better solution is needed.

* Automatic dependency processor
You know what's BS? Having to add "using Gtk;", and then _having to add Gtk
to your compilation flags_! There should be a little
program which looks at the Vala files before compilation, and adds the
packages corresponding with the top level namespaces
you're using in your code.

* (Windows-specific) Support for installer script generation
On Windows, the preferred way of distributing software is via installers,
be it EXE or MSI. If Vala is technically cross-platform,
then support for generating installer scripts should be there, be it for
NSIS or straight-up Windows Installer.

* (Linux-specific) Package generation
On Linux, the preferred way of distributing software is via packages, be it
DEB, RPM or any other format. I think if there is
an installer generator for Windows, then there should be a package
generator for most popular Linux distros, too.

These are the features I'd like to see in a perfect GNOME-centric IDE, with
emphasis on Vala. These features are not impossible, too.
What do you guys think?