The Realm of MasterPi

Those of you GNOME users familiar with TortoiseCVS on Windows are probably aware of the lack of a similar program for Nautilus. There appear to be a few attempts at such a thing which have failed due to some annoying problems with the way CVS works that make the problem more difficult than it seems at first. After much digging through not-the-best or non-existent documentation I’ve managed to hack together a program in Python to at least display the CVS status of files as emblems. (for some of the statuses anyway – and it doesn’t work correctly for directories). Anyway, I do at least have a screenshot to show for my efforts:

My little brother Joel (11) and I made this.

It’s been expanded since the copy I have to limit the number of guesses you get. (He’s carrying it around on his flash drive)

I got the itch to play with new software today when I heard that there was a beta version of Anjuta with lots of fun new features. Apparently it has been removed from the Ubuntu repository because of a bad attempt at introducing it too early and too buggy into Edgy Eft, but it’s been a while since then so I figured I’d give it a shot. It got two thumbs way up from me! This was definitely worth the effort of compiling it from hand, even if I don’t end up using it because of bugs (though I’ve only seen one yet). Features include: glade3 integration (RAD tool – now componentized into the IDE), subversion integration, pluggable text editor interfaces (currently supported are GtkSourceView and Scintilla), multi-language support (C, C++, Python, and [Natively compiled] gjc java), gtk-doc support, Devhelp integration, class generator (C++ and GObject), symbol browser, pkg-config support, Coding standard support (multiple standards to select from including the GNU standard), and a highly customizable layout. There are probably even some that I missed. One big thing is that it produces a readable GNU Autotools project structure, and the project editor interface is designed around the concepts of autotools (such as targets). I haven’t tried it yet, but I’d suspect it can import an existing autotools project rather well (I’m seeing only one anjuta-specific config file in a project I created with anjuta which is an XML file describing only the layout of the IDE – looks like all the project information is stored within the autotools project structure). That also means it’d be a cinch to start working on an Anjuta project from the command line or maybe even edit it simultaneously with both methods. If they haven’t already, it’d be easy enough to put file monitors on the Makefile.am files to detect changes in order to update any running copies of Anjuta.

This project makes me excited for the future of non-C# GNOME. I was beginning to think that MonoDevelop would come out as the primary IDE and Anjuta would be left in the dust, but the competition should remain healthy for quite some time now from what I’ve just seen. Alleged bugs aside, Anjuta actually looks like a better IDE than MonoDevelop at the moment. That said, I haven’t tried the beta of MonoDevelop so it might have some new features as well.

I was also excited to discover a new language in the works designed to provide native syntax support for GObject. It’s called Vala and it looks like it’s in the early stages of development but it looks like it could be the missing language in the GObject system, and do for GObject what C# did for .NET.

I would be amiss to leave out the 1337ness of the environment I was discovering all this in: beryl allowing me to put my music visualization behind all my other semi-transparent windows, thus holding a conversation on Gaim and monitoring the compile progress of Anjuta without switching windows. Even now, I can see the visualization (a new feature of Rhythmbox, by the way) behind my web browser window, and behind that my desktop. Also, for those that haven’t realized it yet: panels are windows too, and can be made semi-transparent just as easily as any other window with beryl (default Alt+MouseWheel).

::EDIT:: Screenshot!