Status
I just quit my job. Whether or not I’ll wind up with a new job in the technology sector remains up in the air. I would prefer not, but it just pays better than any other job you can get with a high school diploma.
That said, I’m hoping to free up some energy for programming efforts I actually like. The problem with working a job in a field that you consider your hobby, is it saps your energy to pursue your real life, and to pursue your hobby as a hobby. Perhaps now Mousepad will get back into shape.
I have a roadmap of sorts for Mousepad. My goal is to get the Mousepad rewrite up to the functionality of the last release. The only real difference should be that Mousepad will be more maintainable than the old Leafpad mess, and potentially faster. This should only take a day or three, should I find the time. This will become the 0.3.0 release. The 0.3.0 “series” (har har) will be the last of “classic” Mousepad.
The goal for the 0.3.0 series is to have a text editor that opens fast, provides no real frills, and has no dependencies outside of those provided by or required for the current stable version of Xfce.
0.3.1 – recent file support. I have a half finished little lib that handles the spec, which I will likely polish off.
0.3.2 – session support. If 4.4 is out, we can just depend on libexo outright, if not, we’ll probably want have a little “miniexo” inside the Mousepad tree.
At this point, I’d like to begin taking Mousepad in a somewhat more feature heavy direction. That may upset some people, who are just looking for a Notepad clone. These people may fork with my blessing. They can move to requiring libexo for session support, using the recent file support that will appear in Gtk+ 2.10, and maybe even using D-bus to keep all Mousepad windows shoehorned in the same process. Up to them. I need a little more from my text editor than that.
The new goal of Mousepad is to be a fast and slim general purpose text editor, much in the vein of BBedit (the classic Macintosh editor) and Nedit (the greatest editor ever that doesn’t use Gtk). Tentatively this is the direction at that point.
0.4.x – Syntax highlighting (with GtkSourceView, or possibly Scintilla)
0.5.x – Tabs.
0.6.0 – Miscellania – templates, open as copy, revert to saved, yadda yadda. The tiny little time savers release.
0.7.0 – Scripts. Little snippets of code in any language which can either process the whole document, or just a selection.
0.8.0+ – The future! GtkSpell, maybe? Toolbar perhaps? A real plugin system? A function browser?
Syntax highlighting and tabs are no brainers as features, and will likely be simple to implement. After that, I’ll need a little input from users, so all of this is subject to change.
A real concern I have is that by adding features I lose what makes Mousepad appealing now (speed, simplicity) while not bringing enough to the table to be useful relative to older text editors (Vi, Emacs, Nedit, or my console editor of choice, Joe), thus bringing the Gedit hell to Xfce. I think I can walk that line. We’ll just have to wait and see.