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GNOME's Text Editor gedit 'No Longer Maintained', Needs New Developers (gnome.org)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In a post to the gedit mailing list, Sébastien Wilmet states that gedit is no longer maintained and asks "any developer interested to take over the maintenance of gedit?"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?
maintaining a great piece of open source software?
It was ok once upon a time. It's a UI disaster now.
I don't gedit.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
If I took over this project I'd rip all that shit out and simply use Lua for everything. Developers are so stupid.
And now you have five programming languages in gedit.
Just wait for systemd-geditd
Long live ed.
A Slashdot commenter predicted the demise of gedit almost three years ago. The core of this argument was the following:
I don't like GNOME anything if I can help it, to be honest. I find myself using nano more than anything for simple text editing. If not TTY, then XFCE and GTK all the way.
Exactly. I can keep on using Microsoft Office Accounting, Encarta, MapPoint, Windows Movie Maker, Windows Messenger, Microsoft Expression Design, FrontPage, Picture It!, Microsoft Money, and many other professional grade tools secure in the knowledge that with a huge commercial software company behind them, they'll still be actively developed and supported for many years to come.
I've used Geany for years. Active development, lots of useful plugins, capable of being built with GTK2 or GTK3, etc.
Surely you jest! The pinnacle state for any software package is having an email client functionality.
I don't know if I'm ready for such bleeding edge features as:
View CVS changelogs
For now, I'll stick to RCS changelogs, thank you!
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?
For me, "Pluma" is the real gedit anyway.
One of the first things when I upgraded from GNOME 2.0 to Mate was to add an alias. Too bad that it uses GTK+ 3.0 now though, with the crap scrollbar and the annoying smooth scrolling that can't be turned off.
Pluma is still actively maintained, as is the core of both forks: GtkSourceView.
The rest of GNOME 3's "gedit" is specific to GNOME 3. Let it die!
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
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!
The examples you give are terrible. The reason these programs are not being made anymore is mostly that nobody was using them. Dropping support for gedit is more akin to Microsoft dropping support for Notepad. While I don't think Notepad is all that great, it is used very widely. While I think the wording of the GP statement makes it an obvious troll, I think he has a point. You see a lot of churn in some Linux distributions, where programs and important subsystems are frequently replaced by others which are not clearly superior. I think this is because developers working for free would rather work on their own code than fix programs made by someone else, which is perfectly understandable. It doesn't make for a consistent user experience though, and makes it painful to keep documentation up to date. I think this is what is going to happen in this case too.
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
WOOOOSH! (it was clear to me that every example of Microsoft software arglebargle_xiv listed was a discontinued application. That made his post either sarcastic, tongue in cheek or both. I'm surprised the folks with mod points today didn't catch that and mod him as "funny" instead of "insightful")
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
Actually, MSPaint is being discontinued and people still love it.
Then again, MS broke it in Windows 7 and literally never fixed it since then. Go ahead, zoom 2x or higher, and try and adjust the canvas size by shrinking it inward. The second you let go, it actually shrinks further in.
Also, Microsoft discontinues SUPPORT of products before they even discontinue them. Everything has to be Office 365. Got Office 2010? It'll work with CRM 2016. Except it won't, because you need the CRM Plugin for Outlook which DOESN'T support 2010.
BUT WAIT. It also only supports IE10 and IE11. No Edge browser. Wait. WHAT? (And God forbid they support competitors browsers on this thing called The Internet which is supposed to be designed for compatibility.) Even funnier is, when we were supporting a client, we had to escalate to the (India) Microsoft CRM team, who then instructed us to "Try using it in Chrome" when IE kept breaking.
Microsoft is a complete shitshow of compatibility. Half of it is intentional, the other half is their company is in complete disarray. Every year I support their products, I lose a little more respect for them. I have written page-long replies on Slashdot before detailing my horror with their lack of actual compatibility between products. (Like how you can make textfields in SQL that are too long that will crash Microsoft's import/export tool. So you can basically never migrate certain databases without insane workarounds like 3rd-party ODBC drivers.)
Emacs and/or Vim.
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
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
I'll not reply to your full post, but I'll take a shot at your claim that Paint is getting discontinued. As a matter of fact, Microsoft finally decided to continue supporting it after people complained. Thus, they're willing to change their minds. In the case of gedit, you have to change the mind of one person, who probably doesn't have time to keep supporting it. This is much more difficult and unlikely to happen.
Because writing programs in a language even slower than JavaScript is a brilliant idea.
Good point. For a text editor, I'd go directly to asm. Can't afford to let all those layers get in the way of rending text files or slowing down keyboard input.
lucm, indeed.
Do like me: opt out of the mod thing entirely. It doesn't work, never has, never will.
If you just browse at +1s you're missing out. Some of the hardcore gay porn and sleeper cell instructions that lives in the -1 level can be quite entertaining. Embrace the darkness and light alike. Free yourself from the petty moderation cliques.
lucm, indeed.
just let it die
But then we'll have no way to open files saved in gedit's proprietary plaintext format! I've literally got hundreds of .txt files on my hard drive!
#DeleteChrome
In the case of gedit, you have to change the mind of one person, who probably doesn't have time to keep supporting it. This is much more difficult and unlikely to happen.
Huh? In the case of gedit, you need one volunteer to take over. I'd be quite surprised if somebody doesn't do exactly that.
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.
Indeed, it's sooooo slooooow.
It's so slow to start up that Daniel Stone used it to "prove that X is slow" - funny how he never did the benchmark on Wayland and also didn't compare with an old gtk2 version that wasn't so bloated.
"Truth about Wayland" indeed. How many years ago was that? Nearly finished was it?