Friday, April 30, 2010

Scintilla Cocoa Bzr and Launchpad

I've started investigating the software product Scintilla. I'm specifically looking into the mac versions of scintilla (cocoa and macosx inside the source tree).

After doing some work with both the cocoa and the macosx version, I truly appreciate how much extra "stuff" apple gives you with the cocoa platform.

In exchange for some control over how things work (ie certain tasks become automagical) Apple gives you really easy ways to implement saving/opening/multipleDocs/"dirty-alert" etc. It's really quite amazing.

I've managed to work on a few bugs for this software because launchpad-bzr is VERY VERY easy to to drive-by-contributions.

So far, I've contributed
- mouse wheel fixes (zooming more like firefox, horizontal scrolling no longer needs holding the shift key, no more zooming 'jumpyness' when using the magic mouse)
- makefiles to build the cocoa project and makefiles to build the sample application

Im currently creating my own Source code Text editor called CodeAssistor because there is a serious lack of light-weight text editing software on the mac.

CodeAssistor is actually pretty solid right now, and I use it for all my editing needs (C,C++,ObjC,make,txt... java is there too but sorta tacked on). The application is comparatively tiny, only 2.5MB (TextWrangler is 28.8MB, TextEdit is 16.3 MB, jEdit is 30.8MB) and blazingly fast. Unfortunately it lacks a Search feature (DOH!) which I totally forgot about when I was thinking about the UI and now have to figure out how to not make the program ugly.

What kind of text editor doesn't have a search feature? DOH DOH DOH. Thats why i have yet to release the software. A textEditor w/o search is just plain stupid.