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Scratchpad 0.3.0 released

Submitted by Daniel Borgmann on Wed, 2006-09-27 08:41. Bag of Software
Bag of Software

Scratchpad is a lightweight but useful spatial text editor. This is the first release after the port to Vala, which means that Scratchpad runs natively now and does not require Mono anymore. Another new feature is tag-based replacing, as demonstrated in this screencast:

http://dborg.wordpress.com/files/2006/09/scratchpad-replace.gif

Homepage and screenshots can be found at: http://dborg.wordpress.com/scratchpad/

Vala is a new programming language for the GNOME platform, which offers a C#-like syntax and modern language features but compiles directly to C code and is closely tight to GLib. More information can be found at: http://vala.paldo.org/

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That's really really cool. by Anonymous George (not verified)

Thanks, and I'm glad that

Submitted by Daniel Borgmann on Wed, 2006-09-27 23:12.

Thanks, and I'm glad that you noticed. :-) Vim is indeed an inspiration for me and my editor of choice on the command line. I'm not an expert vim-user though, so could you tell me which features in particular you are missing?

Good to have you back scratchpad by Anonymous George (not verified)

You will have to make

Submitted by Daniel Borgmann on Wed, 2006-09-27 22:59.

You will have to make install (atm to /usr or /usr/local) before scratchpad can find the UI definitions. I should make it put out a more useful error message...

I will try to come up with a replacement for the revisions, but I really think it needs to be a desktop feature. One thing I want to do is to integrate with bazaar (and subversion) with the project oriented interface, which will be my priority from now.

This is a cool approach to

Submitted by Anonymous George (not verified) on Wed, 2006-09-27 10:37.

This is a cool approach to text editing!

I would dare to remove completely the file menu (but your program should never crash =), autosaving the document often (you now miss the save menu entry =), and implementing something like the new Vim "time machine" functionality to browse the saved versions of the document...

Andrea

Thanks. The file menu

Submitted by Daniel Borgmann on Wed, 2006-09-27 11:56.

Thanks. The file menu already only contains Close and an option to open the current folder of the document. ;-)

I'd like to have something like a permanent document history as a replacement for the revision browser. It should probably be a desktop feature though, as proposed by Seth Nickell for GNOME Storage back in the days... I find it hard to come up with a convincing application-based concept, especially since I can't store any extra data in plain text files. If the history is stored outside of the document file, then it can easily go out of sync if it isn't managed by the desktop.

Thanks. The file menu by Anonymous George (not verified)

To close the document/editor

Submitted by Daniel Borgmann on Wed, 2006-09-27 22:52.

To close the document/editor should be enough the window close button, i'm not an expert in interfaces, but having two ways to do the same task IMHO isn't optimal.

I would agree that the close button is enough, but there is also a useful shortcut (Ctrl+W) and I would like all important shortcuts to be listed in the menu, so the user can easily look them up.

Vala

Submitted by Anonymous George (not verified) on Wed, 2006-09-27 10:12.

I have no idea how good or otherwise this language is, but thankyou to anyone involved in it! I've often wanted a direct way to use GLib without having to go through the hell of all those macros you need for every GObject type, and any project that might make things easier is very welcome.

Hear hear...

Submitted by Anonymous George (not verified) on Fri, 2006-09-29 08:20.

That's what kept me from writing gtk apps so far and use qt instead (depite that I better like the lgpl license of gtk). I know that you can use gtkmm and that it has a very nice API. But using vala you can omit the overhead of the c++ wrappers, and get a bunch of new language features e.g. lambda.

It looks very promising. I'm looking forward to try it out.