Flutterby™! : Development frustrations

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Development frustrations

2004-09-18 21:06:25.62643+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments

Aaugh! Just when I thought I was getting close to my ideal development environment... So, there are reasons I both like and dislike Python, but I like its object syntax better than Perl, and it's easier to deploy apps on Windows, so I'm willing to overlook all of the places it's deficient (starting with documentation). wxWidgets is a "lowest common denominator" widget set, but it uses native widgets across platforms, and is well supported with wxPython. I'll forgive the lack of an MVC architecture for various core widgets, because that's functionality lacking in the Windows[Wiki] widget set. I can even accept that wxGlade has a long way to go before it catches up with Glade, and that the other GUIs for this purpose are even further behind.

However... What the hell is up with the lack of a good text editor control? I don't want much, The native wx.TextCtrl would almost do it, except that there's apparently no way to read back styles once they've been set. Scintilla goes even further afield, saying:

The biggest problem with Richedit and other similar controls is that they treat styling changes as important persistent changes to the document so they are saved into the undo stack and set the document's dirty flag. For source code, styling should not be persisted as it can be mechanically recreated.

but that behavior is exactly what I want: The ability to set up some simple styles, attach attribute information to those styles, maintain them in the edit stack, and have word wrap. Short of, yet again, switching back to GTK or something, anyone have a suggestion?

[ related topics: Microsoft Perl Open Source Software Engineering Python ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: made: 2004-09-19 02:09:55.640597+00 by: TheSHAD0W [edit history]

[deleted]

#Comment Re: made: 2004-09-19 02:35:40.043433+00 by: TheSHAD0W

What about pyGTK?

#Comment Re: made: 2004-09-19 20:56:53.291978+00 by: Dan Lyke

There was some reason I hadn't done that, but as I struggle with trying to compile the latest versions of stuff to try to shoehorn a feature into a square hole, I think dropping back to that is a good idea.

Loses the native widgets and easy Win32-ness, alas, but...

#Comment Re: made: 2004-09-19 21:47:34.460082+00 by: Dan Lyke [edit history]

Aaargh! Because in the current Debian packages, the python-glade package is broken in bizarre ways. My bad. Wrong version of glade.