[Kommander-devel] KTextEditor in Kommander

[Eric Laffoon]

On Thursday 10 August 2006 1:54 pm, Andras Mantia wrote:
> On Thursday 10 August 2006 22:49, Eric Laffoon wrote:
> > As nice as this I'd like to see what we can do that is of nominal
> > effort and a good return. Here are some ideas I have with the
> > suggestion that Andras can do them or give us feedback.
> >
> > 1) highlight functions @function.method and @#comments
>
> This will require a new syntax highlighting file (I will try to create
> one).

It should be an easy one. ;-)
>
> > 2) add line number option to the main menu
>
> This is the biggest problem. The editor widget is embedded to a dialog,
> and not into the mainwindow. This is somewhat unusual usage of a kpart,
> as for example you cannot access the main menu while the dialog is
> shown. Also the fact that Kommander does not use the KDE XMLGUI to
> build its user interface makes merging of a part and the main
> application interface rather hard, if not impossible. The best I may
> try to do is to make a stripped down configuration dialog for the
> editor.

I understand this and I don't expect it to be possible to reach these 
configurations from the editor as it's a modal window. Some simple 
configuration dialog for modest basic features is great.
>
> > 3) Either add tab width option or at least decrease the default tab
> > value to reflect the smaller edit space
>
> Same here.
>
> > 4) context menu to load function under cursor into Function Browser
>
> This should be possible to do.

And more interesting than the dialog. ;-)
>
> > 5) bookmark ability, probably with context menus
>
> It is possible, but of course have to be re-implemented, due to the
> limitations in 2). But i shouldn't be hard.
>
> Andras
I'm not sure how much Kommander needs bookmarks, but one liability is that in 
order to test we have to close the dialog (saving the instructions) and run 
it. Then if we want to tweak things we have to get back to it. Most KT is 
probably short. However this does bring up one irritation. There is no way to 
easily revert changes. I'm not sure how easy this might be to do since we're 
closing the file. I don't want to put a lot of work into this. Would it be 
much work to make an edit save a temp file which would save history to make 
reverting easier? 

This is one reason why I'd like to have the editor and window design switched 
for what we're doing with Kommander. It would make more sense to have test 
actually run a temp file while the editor remains open, then save the file 
when we're happy with it.
-- 
Eric Laffoon
Project Lead - kdewebdev module