Mousepad Improvements

[Matthew Brush]

On 11-10-01 08:15 AM, Liviu Andronic wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 11:31 AM, Matthew Brush<mbrush at codebrainz.ca>  wrote:
>> On 11-10-01 02:04 AM, Nick Schermer wrote:
>>>
>>> Syntax highlighting was never in the scope of Mousepad, there are tons
>>> of editors that do that way better then Mousepad can ever do. The
>>
>> Ok, though there are tons of editors that do everything else Mousepad does
>> too.  Syntax highlighting is useful for editing configuration files, shell
>> scripts, etc. and it's super easy to add with GtkSourceView, needing very
>> small changes to existing GtkTextView code.
>>
> I don't have much say in these things, but I see few reasons for not
> including syntax highlighting as long as someone is willing to work on
> the feature, and it is:
> - provided by GTK itself (thus eliminating the need for additional dependencies)

GtkSourceView is actually separate from GTK+, but it's a GNOME project. 
  If the additional dependency is an issue, you could include a copy of 
GtkSourceView/statically compile it into Mousepad, though that would be 
weird.  It's more like libvte is to xfce4-terminal.

> - elegantly integrated with the Options/Settings
> - optional (and perhaps disabled by default).

It's a subclass of GtkTextView, so until you actually enable some of its 
features, you'd never know you weren't using a plain old GtkTextView.

>
> I don't think people would tend to use Mousepad for heavy code
> development, but when performing one-shot modifications to some files
> a bit of highlighting may be nice.
>

I think it's a basic feature that most Linux users expect from even the 
most minimal editor...even the "nano" editor has syntax highlighting.

Cheers,
Matthew Brush