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GNOME's Text Editor gedit 'No Longer Maintained', Needs New Developers (gnome.org)
AmiMoJo brings news about gedit, the default text editor for GNOME:
In a post to the gedit mailing list, Sébastien Wilmet states that gedit is no longer maintained and asks "any developer interested to take over the maintenance of gedit?" Just in case you were considering it, he warns "BTW while the gedit core is written in C (with a bit of Objective-C for Mac OS X support), some plugins are written in Vala or Python. If you take over gedit maintenance, you'll need to deal with four programming languages (without counting the build system). The Python code is not compiled, so when doing refactorings in gedit core, good luck to port all the plugins (the Python code is also less "greppable" than C). At least with Vala there is a compiler, even if I would not recommend Vala."
Sébastien's comments were surrounded by a <rant-on-languages> tag, but they're still crying out for some serious discussion. Any Slashdot readers want to share their own insights on Python, some fond thoughts on gedit, or suggestions for maintaining a great piece of open source software?
Sébastien's comments were surrounded by a <rant-on-languages> tag, but they're still crying out for some serious discussion. Any Slashdot readers want to share their own insights on Python, some fond thoughts on gedit, or suggestions for maintaining a great piece of open source software?
just let it die
Use XeD. It is part of the Mint team XAPPS initiative whose purpose is to maintain a set of basic end user desktop apps, such as text editor, image viewer, photo organizer, etc.
I believe it's all part of maintaining a consistent user experience on Mint so that nothing you're used to about your preferred desktop experience/workflow gets changed/compromised, something that I really appreciate personally!
Twinstiq, game news
If I took over this project I'd rip all that shit out and simply use Lua for everything. Developers are so stupid.
use mcedit from midnight commander instead.
maintaining a great piece of open source software?
It was ok once upon a time. It's a UI disaster now.
Long live sublime text
I don't gedit.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Im sure Electron will handle it in snap package form. Excuse the horrible joke, but you know some snot-nosed, millennial developer will think it's a good idea.
Does the world really need more than one text editor? After all, Emacs is still maintained.
There is nothing Gedit does better than Gvim. It only wastes bytes of storage
And more hardware drivers. Even unsupported Windows XP has three times the market share of Linux.
Oh, no! Go will be it! Nonono! Scala! (and give it a browser front-end). In any case, it'll be deployed as Flatpack! No! As Unikernel!
(In the meantime, /me uses vim and Emacs to about equal parts. Peace of mind, save when I'm force to edit something in the browser (right now, for example: that's why my /. posts end always somewhat grumpy).
Just wait for systemd-geditd
That can basically happen to any open source software at any time. That's why it's better to use professional grade software such as Windows 10 Pro. Continuity.
Pluma is better anyway.
A Slashdot commenter predicted the demise of gedit almost three years ago. The core of this argument was the following:
Good luck trying to contribute to GNOME, a project that suffers from severe NIH syndrome. Your patches will be ignored or acknowledged but never applied, without any constructive criticism.
Better join XFCE, KDE, or any other desktop project.
I mean, who uses gedit anyway?
That's a problem I have seen many times. A developer has a favorite language, and when he is asked to develop something, he downloads the latest version of the compiler from git and here we go. Then you have to explain that no, we really can't ask the customers to install a 250 MB runtime just to run your small utility. And we really can't maintain something written in a programming language that changes every few months. Developing something in C++ is more pain than in many other languages, but maintaining it for 20 years afterwards seems much easier.
But I will rewrite it all in Javascript. It'll be one language for everything.
Or I'll rewrite it in VB.NET
I've used Geany for years. Active development, lots of useful plugins, capable of being built with GTK2 or GTK3, etc.
Another one bites the dust!
And another one's gone, another one's gone!
Another one bites the dust!
This languages clusterfuck doesn't look maintainable. There are better text editors than gedit. There are too many of them anyway (as with anything in Linux). Also gedit is specific to gnome -- how should an application ever gain enough traction to be maintained for free by its user base if it is specific to Linux and to one particular desktop environment?
Who uses this piece of shit editor anyways? It's got about as many features as notepad.exe, with worse UI and more eye cancer. And why does it need so many languages?!?
If you want a simplistic graphical editor use something like kwrite, otherwise kate, sublime, and others provide tons more features. (Vim/emacs users use a terminal anyway)
Thinking of it, it's a good example of how all g-applications are horrible crap.
He says using it for this post. I have a rather large hosts file. Using gedit I sorted it alphabetically and closed it without saving. It's now sorted.
627 text editors written for Linux. More than half of them advertised as Clean! Simple! Is "the Community" supposed to cry and rally to the salvation of each one that finally meets its long, drawn-out demise?
So first they remove all useful features from gedit so that it is hardly more than a notepad clone, and then they stop maintaining it altogether?
I think it's great. If I were retired I'd maintain it (6 years away). Not sure where all the negativity is coming from.
Since this is likely to turn into a discussion of our favorite text editors, I have to say that I really like Notepadqq (http://notepadqq.altervista.org/wp/). It's inspired by Notepad++ and it feels very similar for those of us who do most of our work in Windows. Combine it with the Inconsolata font (http://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html) and you can't go wrong.
Long time Slashdot readers will know how it was always Microsoft, and then later on SCO, who were accused of causing harm to Linux distributions, and open source software in general.
Yet it's now becoming more and more apparent that it's not outside influences that are most harmful to Linux and open source, but rather it's the open source projects that destroy themselves by making idiotic and unwanted changes, which in turn causes the best users to flee to alternatives.
This gedit nonsense is just a small part of the GNOME project destroying itself through the disastrous GNOME 3 released. GNOME 3 is a complete regression compared to the GNOME 2 user experience, forcing its best users and developers to seek alternatives. It wasn't Microsoft that made this happen. It wasn't SCO that made this happen. It was the GNOME project itself!
Firefox is another example. Years of unwanted changes forced on its users by the Firefox developers have caused these users to flee to Chrome and other browsers. Now Firefox has only about 5% of the browser market. That puts it well below Chrome, well below Safari, and well below UC Browser for Android. Even Opera Mini, at 3.26%, has about as many users as Firefox 54's 3.75%! Now Firefox has become an irrelevant, fourth- or fifth-tier browser that's ignored by users and web developers alike. It wasn't Microsoft that made this happen. It wasn't SCO that made this happen. It was the Firefox project itself!
The Linux distros that have forced systemd on their users is another example. Debian was once known as a solid, robust, trustworthy Linux distro. But it has lost that reputation now that it has switched to systemd. Lots of users have reported problems with systemd, as seen by the bug reports and mailing list postings begging for help with problems affecting systemd. Many of these Linux users have had to switch to FreeBSD, macOS, or even Windows in order to get a reliable OS. It wasn't Microsoft that made this happen. It wasn't SCO that made this happen. It was these Linux distros themselves!
The worst enemy of open source projects isn't Microsoft or SCO. The worst enemy of open source projects are their own leadership and developers!
With Atom being available and on more than just one platform why would someone care about gedit?
Or vi for that matter. there are several perfectly good text editors, one less wont matter.
You want an editor? Pick your favorite from: [vim, emacs].
Everything else is inferior to those. We don't need a million different incapable little text editors.
gedit is written in C. There is a little bit of Objective-C for Mac OS X support. Then plugins are written in Vala or Python.
Why is this rant-worthy? IMHO Python is a great choice for writing plugins. And for a while GNOME was pushing Vala so that is not a shock.
Seems like Sebastien Wilmet is nakedly trying to encourage people to want gedit to die. After the language rant he says that helping gedit also helps some guy who sells gedit on the Mac. He also rants that gedit ought to be a super-thin shell around his new project Tepl, libraries for text editor features. This is a weird and barely-concealed agenda.
I am not going to volunteer for this, but it's because I am busy, not because I am scared of a project with 4 languages.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
If it isn't being maintained, clearly nobody gives a fuck about it. Let it die.
Writing Gtk-based applications is about as much fun as root canal without anesthesia. It is no wonder that popular open source apps are migrating to Qt.
The problem with gedit (and gnome apps in general) is that they sacrifice usability for looks. Its the whole "form before function" idiotic mentality.
For example, gedit used to have a keyboard shortcut that allowed you to quickly go to a specific line, however the latest gedit goes away with that. Now you have to dig through the menu buttons to find it.
Another good example - in gnome, you literally cannot change the background of your desktop to black without doing crazy stuff! In the background settings app, there are only few color options that someone has selected and thats what you are stuck with.
So someone has decided to add pink to the list of options, but no black. WTF. I could understand if there were a default list of whatever colors, but there should at least be a color selector in there so users can select other colors. Not all of the gnome users are 15 year old girls, right?
Sounds like an excuse to merge it into SystemD isn't that why they merged udev, PulseAudio, etc. into it.
Emacs and/or Vim.
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
I've been using gedit as a copy paste area since it first came out. For alt-tab and alt-tilde convenience, I like having a separate, barebones text editor with syntax highlighting from my main editor. I'll be sad if this project is abandoned, but I doubt it'll be rendered useless any time soon.
In a terminal ...
Most if the time I have an IDE open anyway and don't need an extra 'text editor'.
But I usually have a few terminals open, too.
So I use what ever opens the file faster.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
emacs > all, you whippersnappers...
If gedit is the mess that is described above, then it should be redone ASAP our die. Plain and simple.
People, it's a freakin' simple text editor, not the next coming of Photoshop. Redoing it in pure Vala should be a walk in the park for your type a gnome dev. Besides scintilla there has to be some default text widget on top which gedit is built or can be rebuilt in 2 weeks flat.
And Jesus, screw python. I love python, it's my favorite PL, but what douche had the brilliant idea to build a freakin'text editor with Python? Seriously?
And screw macOS compatibility. They have their own editors. Literally no one uses gedit on macOS, trust a long time Mac and Linux user on this one.
If Vala and Gnome Builder were useable, I'd might even step up for the task. Sadly, even native IDEs on Gnome are a large type PITA. Anjura and Gnome Builder have fallen flat on their noses with me time and time again. Sad but true.
My 2 eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Yeah.. the ordinary.. simple toilet has out lived its usefullness.. we dont' need it anymore.
Get modern.. everyone should be doing it in the streets.. its more socialable
(1) I don't mind the call for volunteers, but I also don't mind the thought of gedit (or any other project) dying due to lack of interest. I think I used gedit for an entire afternoon once and that was plenty for me, but if it scratches somebody else's itch, good on them.
(2) "The Python code is not compiled, so when doing refactorings in gedit core, good luck to port all the plugins" - this doesn't entirely make sense to me, but my best guess is that he's saying that the preferred approach to refactoring is basically to change stuff like an API declaration and then rely on compiler errors to find all the corresponding callers that need to be updated. Maybe that's not fair, but without more context, that's my only guess.
Anyway, if true, that's a pretty terrible way to do refactoring (if for no other reason than it can't always catch everything), so I hope that's not what he meant. A good regression test suite is the right way to handle refactoring, and is more or less required if you have any sort of public API that you've encouraged people to build against, and so criticizing the plugin language (be it Python or anything else) seems misguided and a red flag (and Python specifically is often a really excellent choice for plugins).
Refactoring a public API or a large codebase is hard and requires great care, and there's only so much you can do to get around that. If you have a compiled language that can catch a few cases you've missed, that's a little added bonus but really should be more or less your last line of defense (i.e. after you've completed your refactoring, if you have a compiled language and the compiler finds anything you missed, that's nice, but it should also kinda freak you out if it's anything more than something like a minor typo, because otherwise it means you probably weren't disciplined enough in your refactoring).
Anyway, I get it - these are OSS projects and people are giving of their free time, etc. But compiler-error-driven refactoring for anything substantial is a big no no.
(3) "(the Python code is also less "greppable" than C)" - in a general sense I'd strongly disagree and categorize this as a false statement, and he didn't offer any additional insight to back it up, at least that I saw. So maybe he meant the Python code specific to gedit or something?
(4) I'm not sure he's really interested in having people take over gedit maintenance per se anyway - his post makes it sound like a mess of a project ("Before I contribute to GtkSourceView, there was 8000 lines of code in gedit for the file loading and saving") and suggests a better route might be to just wait while his own project matures ("Note that I still develop Tepl, so over time it has more and more features. If gedit is not developed during several years, maybe it'll be possible to remove a big amount of code from gedit by porting it to Tepl").
GNOME's Text Editor gedit 'No Longer Maintained as of 02/11/1999', Needs New Developers
I was rather amazed at the score GP post got, as well.
This points out the problem with the Slashdot rating system. There are now way too many slashdotters (daughters of Slash?) who haven't got a clue but who have managed to get moderator points.
Let me make a modest proposal: Slashdot's quality would improve dramatically if one of the requirements for mod points was a 10+ history of activity on Slashdot. At the very least, that would exclude most of the K-8 crowd.
There is a reason why we old guys use vi,vim,emacs.
Who ever used or needed gedit ?
By the way, who need gnome either?
Because there is a shameful dearth of text editors under Linux.
Vee, I vonder Vhat Ve could replace It wIth...
Windowed text editing is for W i nies!
627 text editors for Linux and one of them is going to die? Jeez, this is really TERRIBLE news... the whole open source movement will go downhill!
Seriously, with Qt and other frameworks it's almost immediate to make one, if you need just the open-edit-save cycle. With Scintilla and a couple more libs you can put up a decent text editor in a breeze, e.g. less than a day of work. A text editor dying it's not news.
For the four programming languages used: that's madness. It's the kind of programmer hubris that make projects bigger and bigger, until no one can really do anything on them. Like Firefox, as someone named it... I bet dollars vs. beans that Firefox began to go awry when the old developers, those who fixed the mess from Netscape and built the first Mozilla codebase, went away and new ones went in...
So what happens if someone tries to use gedit? Will the OS warn the user that the software is now unsupported and possibly insecure?
What if there was a ongoing-cost project to support software? What if the OS were responsible for checking the validity and support status of software, and if the software was unsupported, there would actually be an option to help support it?
Oh well. Pointless to repeat the obvious. DAUPR is my new motto, but it never happens. Especially not on Slashdot, where never is heard an encouraging word.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Smaller, extensible with Lua and a good general editor out of the box.
http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html
Stop duplicating effort just so you can put "g" or "k" in front of the name. There are plenty of good text editors, graphical ones even.
Some things get to the point where they serve their purpose well, and they don't need changing any more. People don't invent new flatware to eat with; companies keep coming out with new patterns, but everything is pretty much the same size and weight and angles, and forks usually have four tines, and the designs are pretty well set. The FOSS community seems to think that constant change is good; most products in the real world stabilize.
I didn't know gedit supported plugins.
I've used gedit like I think most people use it. To quickly jolt down something or as a cut and paste buffer.
But now I know there are plugins. So I searched for them. And there are a few, I found less than a dozen, so I don't really understand why not being able to keep the api would be such a big problem.
I don't even understand why a barebones editor, like gedit, would even need a plugin system. It's like it is every project whet dream to have other programmers use their api so everything has to have an api. Even when it makes no sense at all.
Just use gvim already. It is graphical and has a 'g' in front!
One would hope that GEdit would be a mature and stable text editor that simply required no further maintenance because it was a simple text editor that was stable.
But, that is not at all the case with GEdit. What happened is a few utter fucking morons decided a couple of years ago to sex up GEDit and make it all trendy in appearance. They drastically changed the menus, toolbars and functionality and turned GEdit into a steaming pile of shit that claims to be a simple text editor. They introduced bugs and inefficient code that needs to be re-refactored.
Then these short attention span halfwits lost interest and went on to do God knows what, probably recreate an MP3 player, and have abandoned the smoking wreckage that is GEdit.
What needs to happen is for someone to roll GEdit back to where it was four years ago and then it can be abandoned as STABLE and not needing to be fucked with.
Fortunately, vi and nano are still things.
As someone who uses gedit as his primary text editor, this is fairly disastrous news. And as someone who believes in the "the browser, the browser, and nothing but the browser" future, I've been dabbling with browser based editors, mainly CodeMirror.
I'm generally very impressed with CodeMirror (website https://codemirror.net/) used in conjunction with with a Node package at https://www.npmjs.com/package/...
But it's not quite as convenient as gedit (especially if you don't do all your development on a remote server). Does anyone else use CodeMirror, or have suggestions for a better modern editor in the web world?
If it works, it's obsolete
I saw the screenshot for the new, improved gedit.
Holy shit, what UI innovation! The checkboxes for selectable items are on the RIGHT SIDE, unlike every other fucking UI in existence. I would love to hear from the developers why they broke with this simple standard. Just to fuck with the luser? I don't use GNOME, so if you tell me that is how it's done in GNOME, then my critique goes that much higher.