Another Twist in the Road

This weekend I thought about using C# for Synpl. This was the original plan when I started working on the "structured editor" variation of Synpl, but I gave up because I didn't want to tie it to Windows.

Since wxWidgets is such a great library, I tried to find a .NET wrapper for it. There is one, but it's not updated since 2007, and it doesn't work out of the box. Maybe the fact that I tried it on 64bit Ubuntu didn't help, but I had to abandon it anyway.

So I tried Mono and Monodevelop and Gtk#. Gtk again. This time, I managed to tweak the GtkTextView and associated classes to do what I want (for instance, raise events similar to Scintilla's Modification event). There were some bugs, but I managed to find some quick workarounds (for instance, the C# Gtk.TextBuffer class doesn't have a CreateTag method :-) ).

I made some very quick progress and I like the result a lot. Besides, working with autocompletion is so much better than trying to figure out things in the plain Python REPL or the Gedit Python REPL. I guess autocompletion in the editor is a very good complement to a REPL sometimes.

So I'm back to Gtk (well, Gtk#, but only the language is different), but not Gedit since there is no Gedit-sharp.

It did feel like "lateral progress", but the development speed is better. And the final product will be faster.

I need to port the Python code to C# ... good thing there isn't so much of it. I wonder if I'll regret switching from Python to C#.