Re: ANN: Frescobaldi 2.0.4

[Valentin Villenave]

On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 9:50 AM, Wilbert Berendsen <address@hidden> wrote:
> Please let me know the things you miss most! Note that F2 is only
> (roughly) one year old and really written from scratch, the first commit
> is of Nov 11, 2012. I intend to keep developing and adding new
> features. I think the current technical infrastructure and code setup is
> very nice.

I for one was in favor of removing the KDE dependency; but I wasn't
expecting so many features to be missing afterwards! For example,
integrating a web-browser and a terminal was trivial with Kparts, but
now you'd need to recode everything from scratch...

When you first mentioned you were going to go KDE-independent, I
assumed it would be something like SMplayer compared to Kplayer : both
are mplayer front-ends but SMplayer is KDE-independent and is a
**lot** better than Kplayer. I realize now, however, that Frescobaldi
involves much more different components.

Anyhoo, I got "upgraded" to Frescobaldi 2.0 as part of a normal distro
update, without noticing the major version bump... and when I opened
Frescobaldi again, it was kind of a shock.

- aesthetically speaking, the difference is huge and the interface
looks a lot less pretty (pinkish background in the PDF preview: wtf?).
- the source code window sports less pleasant colors (plain
blue/red/black instead of KDE's pastel tones).
- the search function is now just that: no search&replace.
- no more tabs on the side and the bottom: making frames
appear/disappear is a lot less intuitive: you have to **close**
frames, not merely **hide** them (I was used to hiding the log window,
but "closing" it makes less sense to me -- sure, I could just use the
keyboard shortcut but then I'd have to learn it first ;-)
- no more terminal frame (unlike LilyPondTool, where the "log window"
may be used as a terminal emulator).
- no more integrated file browser (the "documents" frame isn't half as useful)
- the new "Compile but don't save" behavior is quite surprising (and
I've found myself loosing more than one score because of it). I'm not
saying it's bad or absurd, it's just unexpected (and should be
optional IMO).
- the intelligent-indenting awesomeness now looks a bit less
intelligent. (Where's my Ctrl-I?)
- the PDF preview offers less features than before (thanks to the kpdf
component I could just select an area with the right-button and copy
it as an image).
- the MIDI player looks gorgeous (but I never use it).
- the Preferences window has more colors and icons, but somehow feels
less complete (a lot of the old one was Kate's preferences, where you
could fine-tune your level of indenting, etc.)

That being said, there still are a lot of nice touches and
afterthoughts that embody the "Frescobaldi spirit" and show how
generously and intelligently you care about your users' every need or
whim: snippets, special chars, "run LilyPond with English messages",
etc. It's so brillantly thought it's disarming.

> Many things are high on the TODO list, and all the needed
> infrastructure is already there:
> - folding in editor

I'd definitely put _that_ one on top of the list. Kate's display of
nested blocks in the colored gutter was _very_ good and convenient.
(And beautiful to look at. :-)

Now, I can't wait to see a Windows and Mac port (that could embed a
ready-to-run LilyPond distribution, by the way)!

Good luck -- you know where to find me if you need any French
translation (although, quite frankly, I've been feeling a bit
discouraged when seeing the subpar work of other contributors to your
fr.po file).

Cheers,
Valentin.