Re: Gorm thoughts for the future...

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

Lundberg, Johannes wrote:
> I'm planning to make an editor which is as similar to Xcode as 
> possible, code it using GNUstep and have it be platform independent. A 
> first step would be only text editor, interface editor is less important.
we are then getting quite off-topic here. We are speaking of an 
interface builder! I'll replay anyway however.
> Features like good code completion, realtime parsing and error reports 
> is a must for me (and most other Obj-C developers I think) if I would 
> use anything other than Xcode.
>
> If we can make ProjectCenter do this it would save me a lot of time and,
>
> I believe it is absolutely a must to an editor that is easy to use and 
> behaves like Xcode to some extent if we are going to get OSX/iOS 
> developers (most of Obj-C developers) start using GNUstep. Since 
> GNUstep doesn't run on OSX it is difficult to use Xcode as editor, 
> however this is what I currently do. 
ProjectCenter is a bit  a stepchild currently, the official maintainer 
comes and goes, I would consider the package practically without maintainer.

I did quite some fixes in the past years and releases, lately others 
like German have helped too, Gregory worked on debugger integration etc.

For my 2cents, I do not plan making PC an XCode clone in terms of design 
and interface. I prefer a smaller, but working tool, a bit like 
ProjectBuilder was. However, PC is quite rought right now and these are 
the things to do:

1) Improve the "basic" internal editor in terms of highlighing, line 
numbering and especially indentation
2) Improve parsing of compiler messages for GCC and Clang
3) Overall improve handling of the files in the project (resources, 
languages, etc etc)
4) improve the debugger integration, currently it is unreliable and 
works only on certain platforms. I have no clue how we can get it to 
work on windows though

Since nobody is ever satisfied with an editor, PC is already designed to 
use alternative editor bundles. This should be improved. German is 
working on his Gemas editor, with auto-completion, syntax highlighting, etc
On the long run, if we had a GS port of Emacs and GVim, it would be 
lovely to integrate directly with those!

Riccardo