Re: [Nano-devel] Re: About the nano rewrite

[David Lawrence Ramsey]

Chris Allegretta wrote:

<snip>

> Doesnt XCurses (part of PDCurses) alreay provide exactly this?  I've
> compiled nano against XCurses before, though not recently and
> certainly not against 1.3. 

It's supposed to provide this, although there are several problems that
keep it from being the ideal solution:

1. There appears to be no way to change the font used, and IIRC it
defaults to "fixed" or some equally small font, so that if you're using
a large resolution, it's practically unreadable.

2. Suspending will take you back to the terminal window you started
XCurses-enabled nano from (assuming it's still open) instead of using
the same window; I'm not sure how to fix this.

3. No integration with the X clipboard that I can find, which is really
the only other reason besides the improved keyboard support that I'd
want X11 support in nano at all.

> Or is the idea here to have some snazzy file graphical file browser to
> read/write files?

Not really.  See #3 above.  I wouldn't mind having an X11-enabled
version (frontend?) to use while in X11 for those reasons, but the only
X11 code I really know is Xlib, and it would be horrendously complicated
to use that.  As for one of the major toolkits, if someone else who
knows more about their use than I do were to add support for it, I would
certainly consider incorporating it, subject to a few limitations (most
notably support for toolkits alone before support for entire desktop
environments based on those toolkits).