Misc news about the gedit text editor, mid-September edition! (Some sections are a bit technical).

Next version will be released when Ready

While the release of GNOME 49.0 was approaching (it's this week!), I came to the conclusion that it's best for gedit to wait more, and to follow the Debian way of releasing software: when it's Ready. "Ready" with an uppercase letter 'R'!

So the question is: what is not ready? Two main things:

• The rework of the file loading and saving: it is something that takes time, and I prefer to be sure that it'll be a solid solution.
• The question about the Python support for implementing plugins. Time will tell what is the answer.

Rework of the file loading and saving (next steps)

Work continues to refactor that part of the code, both in libgedit-gtksourceview and gedit.

I won't go into too much technical details this time. But what the previous developer (Ignacio Casal Quinteiro, aka nacho) wrote (in 2011) in a comment at the top of a class is "welcome to a really big headache."

And naturally, I want to improve the situation. For a long time this class was used as a black box, using only its interface. Time has come to change things! It takes time, but I already see the end of the tunnel and I have good hopes that the code will be better structured. I intend to write about it more once finished.

But I can reveal that there is already a visible improvement: loading a big file (e.g. 200 MB) is now super fast! Previously, it could take one minute to load such file, with a progress bar shown and a Cancel button. Now there is not enough time to even click on (or to see) the Cancel button! (I'm talking about local files, for remote files with a slow network connection, the progress bar is still useful).

To be continued...

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