John E. Davis spake unto us the following wisdom:
> One of the things that I have to add to jed is support for UTF-8
> encoding. When I do that, I will have to rewrite a fair amount of the
> underlying code that tracks the current position (point). It is my
> intention at that time to introduce another character buffer that
> would provide attribute information on a character by character basis.
> That way, any character in the buffer could be assigned a color, font,
> etc. But I do not intend to add that until I add the support for
> UTF-8.
I would like to mention that UTF-8 support would be a huge benefit to
me personally, and I'm sure many others ... I fall into the (possibly
relatively unique) category of having to use multiple character sets
(in the traditional sense -- cyrillic, Japanese, Latin, others), and
the currend jed code handles some of these (notably Eastern character
sets) in a usable but decidedly shady fashion. Xjed is unusable
without patches. I put up with these limitations because it's such a
fantastic editor, but it would be nice to see UTF-8 happen.
> Right now, at the top of my jed development list is to unify the menu
> system so that, e.g., wjed can get the benefit of the more powerful
> tty menus but using the native windows menu system. Also as part of
> this, I am looking into adopting GTK for Xjed to give it menus, scroll
> bars, etc. Its possible that you may see some of this in the next jed
> release via a GTK-slang interface (SLGTK).
The Gtk news is fantastic ... I started to write a slang binding for
Gtk+ about a year and a half ago, but was forced to set it aside due
to time pressures. I would like to note, additionally, that using
Gtk2 as a widget set would provide UTF-8 capability and all of the
associated niceities (input methods, right-to-left rendering, etc.)
more or less for free, as well as the option of using the ports of
Gtk2 to Windows, MacOS X, etc. to provide jed natively on those
systems. (Not that you probably haven't already considered such
things, but just in case. ;-)
Ethan
--
And if I claim to be a wise man / it surely means that I don't know.
-- Kansas, "Carry on Wayward Son"
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