From: Lothar Scholz <mailinglists@...>
Date: 2004-08-31T07:50:52+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] aeditor 1.7

Hello Simon,

SS> On Monday 30 August 2004 20:39, Lothar Scholz wrote:
>> EH> Well, Eclipse can suit your needs, then. It fits all the editors in
>> EH> the same IDE.
>> EH> Except for toolbars or key-bindings, it's pretty much transparent
>> EH> which editor it is using. Perhaps, the text editor is not "one of the
>> EH> smallest" parts of and IDE but it surely needs not to be tied to it.
>>
>> Editor != Editor Widget
>>
>> I meant the text editing widget is one of the smallest parts (Lines Of
>> Code) but one of the most important. Even with a finished AEditor
>> widget you are miles away from it.

SS> Agree lines of code in AEditor is not impressive.

SS> It has taken me very long time to reach this point, where I can edit with my
SS> own editor. The first experimental versions which I wrote in C++ could show
SS> the text and was very poor at dealing with edit operations..
SS> It was more an viewer than an editor.

SS> Even though its few lines of code.. its not something that one can write in a
SS> weekend. Lots of things must be considered and analysed carefully.
SS> 1) finding an appropriate undo/redo/macro system took quite some time.
SS> 2) figuring out how to support folding took forever.
SS> 3) syntaxcoloring+accelerated scrolling requires careful management of 4
SS> layers of caching. 
SS> 4) editing strategies, such as if the cursor should skip tabs or move through
SS> tabs, supporing different indentsize and tabsize... (took lots of time).
SS> 5) made regexp engine that can do multiline selection and skip over foldings
SS> and search through rectangular selections.. and deal with multiple encodings.

SS> This is just some of the things that has taken _long_ time, even though its
SS> relative few lines of code.


SS> I don't like your sentence "One of the smallest parts".  I have not insulted
SS> your IDE..  why Lothar?

It was just from my 'wc' 9,945 lines of code (at the moment) out of
total 210,035 lines. Only my diff frontend has less code. Maybe not
fair because i don't calculate the concrete syntax highlighters as
'editor' parts only the core highlighting engine and i don't support
line folding at the moment.

But you are right it is a lot of work and i guess that nobody can do
it right the first time.


-- 
 Best regards,                        emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com
 Lothar Scholz                        http://www.ruby-ide.com
 CTO Scriptolutions                   Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's