Here are the noteworthy news about the gedit and Enter TeX text editors. (Some sections are a bit technical).

A single package for gedit and its core plugins

Before, users needed to remember to install the gedit-plugins package in order to benefit from additional plugins such as Word Completion or Bookmarks .

Now, all core - or “official” - plugins are part of the main gedit module . So, Word Completion , Bookmarks and others have been copied into the gedit module, and gedit-plugins is now empty/archived.

Note that there are also third-party plugins which are available in other repositories.

New version on the Microsoft Store

gedit 50.0 is now also available on Windows .

The re-implementation of document loading continues

It's now a recurrent topic. Progress has been made, but more work is necessary to fully replace the GtkSourceFileLoader internals.

This time, here is a general description of the methodologies used along with the current state of affairs, without entering into too much technical details. If you're an experienced developer, it'll most probably ring a bell to you :-)

The typical “divide and conquer” methodology is followed: the problem is divided into several smaller ones. The sub-problems are solved individually, providing utility functions and small classes. Then things are built on top, with several layers, gradually solving bigger and bigger problems.

It all looks nice, except that an iterative process is also needed, to revise the solutions already built because of unforeseen problems (it happens all the time in computer science).

The current progress status is that some utilities need to be reworked in order to be a better fit for the above components, and also to fix a couple of unforeseen problems. Thankfully it's not a “back to the drawing board” situation, as the utilities that lie at the bottom layers don't need any change.

For the curious reader, here are the two unforeseen problems encountered:

• iconv() can output nul bytes even for UTF-8 as the target charset. Embedded nuls are not valid UTF-8 according to g_utf8_validate() . So an additional pass of validation is necessary, to escape invalid UTF-8 bytes.

• With the new implementation, at most two copies of the whole file content needs to be present in memory. I stumbled across a corner case where three copies would be necessary, so it needs to be fixed. The three copies were: (1) the content containing a single chunk (or at least a big chunk) of invalid bytes, (2) the invalid chunk escaped, and (3) the content as inserted into the GtkTextBuffer .

  It's just a matter of escaping the invalid bytes directly / at a different place.

  (Note that this is a concern only for the work-in-progress branch; current stable versions of gedit doesn't suffer from that issue).

Enter TeX goodness

The Projects feature has been re-implemented in a better way (mostly under-the-hood changes).

The module is again on GNOME Damned Lies, so there are many translation updates. Thank you, all translators around the globe! In the past I contributed to the French translation, and I directly saw that GNOME translation teams do very high quality work. So, thanks again :) !

Other stuff

As usual there are some other work items fixed or where progress has been made. Among others:

• The comment/uncomment actions have been fine-tuned.
• A prototype has been created in order to improve the main “sandwich” menu in gedit.

Code re-use and Business-to-Business opportunities

There is a lot of potential with the libgedit modules (or also with GtkSourceView for GTK 4), to grow the project into something like the GStreamer multimedia project (but at a smaller scale) where there is a lot of B2B activity with consultancy companies helping to create new products for other businesses.

Especially with libgedit-tepl, the name “Text editor product line” means that it's possible to create other text editors or IDEs products (more easily).

An example that I have in mind is Arduino and its specialized IDE. But there are new programming languages or development platforms that pop up regularly, so there are opportunities to collaborate with them and develop great developer tools for them.

I'll talk about it more in the future, but if you read this and are interested to develop such a business model for gedit and/or GtkSourceView, talk to me !