Curious about next version and developer updates

[Thorsten Haude]

Hi,

* Joachim Lous wrote (2007-05-29 11:13):
>On 5/29/07, Thorsten Haude <yoo at vranx.de> wrote:
>>- Settings system is highly improvable.
>
>I firsrt read that as "highly improbable", but that seems to fit, too :-)

Indeed; just last week I installed NEdit on a fresh system and had to
go through the Tragedy Of The Menu again.


>>There were some attempts to fix all three, but most developers seem to
>>think that everything is fine.
>
>>>Personally the only fundamental issue I know of is the dependency on
>>>Motif, and as fixing that would require a complete re-write of NEdit
>>>from the ground up I can imagine this not happening for a while... :)
>>
>>For all practical purposes the result of that is no longer NEdit.
>
>Alternatively it would require writing our own super-lightweight widget set
>requiring only Xt, and porting to that.  Not impossible, but not very 
>probable either.

Interesting idea. I hope I remember it if the move from Motif ever
comes up for real. Maybe then people come up with close (code-wise)
alternative based on XCB. (Then again, XCB might also be forgotten.)


>Using any other toolkit would either introduce dependencies on stuff
>not availavble
>on some platforms (where NEdit is the only good, stable graphical editor), 
>or
>force us to bloat the distro with the entire toolkit code (which would have 
>to
>be verified for all the platforms supported), so its no longer a
>"small, fast editor".

We carry around a lot of stuff already. Xt is 337972 byte on my
system, Motif 18624558, NEdit (dynamic, debug, stripped) 1282456. Not
an option if the toolkit stays that big.


>Dropping supported platforms would undermine NEdit's reason for being.

Sure, that's one of the things I would not consider. If we ever leave
the herd of Unixes for Linux and any two other OSes, that would be
reason alone to call the result not NEdit.


>For may usage scenarios, NEdit has already been surpassed on Linux in
>ways that it is unlikely to catch up with.

Interesting. Unicode doesn't matter for me most of the time, so NEdit
is still the best tool. Is NEdit missing something beside the obvious?


>The core strengths these days is the stunning range of systems it
>works on (in an age where nost projects only target a couple of OSS
>OSes), the compactness, and single-file install-free executable. Drop
>any of these, and it's a large step closer to dead.

In fact, I would like to even improve the single-fileness and the
install by merging nedit and nc, and by adding macro functions or
file-representation to the binary.


Thorsten
-- 
He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even
his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty,
he establishes a precedent which will reach to himself.
    - Thomas Paine
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