KTextEditor

[Thomas Zander]

On Sun, Oct 06, 2002 at 11:58:14PM -0400, Zack Rusin wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I'm moving our discussion to kde-core-devel. 
> To get everyone up to speed, the idea is pretty simple - our KTextEditor 
> interfaces are too primitive to produce a robust text editor. To be 
> more exact we were working on getting KTextEditor working in KMail for 
> 3.2 but the thing is that KTextEditor wouldn't provide many things we 
> want, like : coloring quoted text like we do in the readerwindow, 
> incremental spell-checking (underlining over misspelled words) - 
> more-less all rich text editing capabilities. So we're left with two 
> choices :
> a) work with another text editor (KRichTextEditor or KoText),
> b) work on fixing KTextEditor and then porting KRichTextEditor or KoText 
> derivative to the new interface,
> 
> I want to do the second one and I'd like to hear your opinion. First of 
> all do we all agree that KTextEditor needs to be expanded to cover more 
> robust text editing capabilities? Or do you guys think that it should 
> stay the way it is and people who want to have rich text editing 
> capabilities should use other things?

The thing we discussed when first the interface moved to kdelibs (and again
when kate did) was that we want one interface for the basic editing and not
more.
Another interface was needed for extra functionality.  My c++ is getting
rusty; but in java I'd just let one main class implement all possible
interfaces so the 'editor' gets more functionality.
The applications that use the interface then try to dynamic_cast the class
to the extra interface and if that succeeds they talk to it.

This way some extra interfaces (which are naturally optional) provide more
functionality.

IMO its a big nono to change an existing interface; all applications that
talk to it suddenly don't compile anymore!

If you (and the kate people) agree on secondairy interfaces I'm inclined
to say there is no problem to move that to kdelibs.

-- 
Thomas Zander   zander at planescape.com
We are what we pretend to be