Xfce News – From Then Till About Now
Let’s pretend the last several months haven’t happened, and I’ll pretend that more than three of you read this.
That said, it seems like the best thing to do is to lay out where we are going, where we are, and what’s happening to get us there. If you care what’s been going on in Xfce, but haven’t been following the various blogs and lists, this is your chance to get caught up.
Mousepad! Finally!
Okay.
So, I finally just crawled through my email till I found the right URL to do a checkout from the Xfce repository.
I felt very very stupid.
Having done so, I pulled a fresh checkout of Mousepad (since the one I had was corrupted), and made a branch for 0.3. Since I was without internet for so long, I was working on Mousepad a few minutes a day in a local repo. I commited those files to the new branch with surprisingly little difficulty.
It’s amazing how easy that was, once I remembered to not be a douche.
You can pull it from the anonymouse repository this way
svn co http://svn.foo-projects.org/svn/xfce/mousepad/branches/mousepad-0.3.x mousepad
And you can build it with a simple ‘make’
Currently, it does very little that’s interesting, just a window with a GtkTextView in it. The Makefile is even handwritten. The goals of this rewrite are:
- Eliminate deprecated stuff where possible
- Organize the code into a maintainable structure
- Take advantage of the Xfce platform more fully
- Make it faster
- Make it smaller
- Add some small features
- More fully learn C, Gtk+, and autotools
We’ll see how much of this I manage to acheive. However, so far, all looks good.
If you see a bug in Mousepad, please let me know. It is highly likely that there are memory management bugs inside. It’s also likely that I do things in ways which are not cross platform, or reinvent the wheel.
As an anecdote, the reason to fork leafpad was I needed printing support. Since I could read C poorly, and write it hardly at all, a good chunk of the printing code was copy and paste from the inside of the “Save” routine. Turns out the old save routine reimplemented a GtkTextView method, and poorly, so the printing code did the same.
Had I realized I didn’t need to fight with it to add printing support, I might not have bothered with the fork, really.