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Hi Sergii,
More than 15 years ago I joined the
GNUstep development because I like NeXT's OS design, look and
feel. At that time my dream was to return NeXTSTEP desktop to
Linux. After 15+ years my dream still alive. I understand that
GNUstep project goals somewhat changed over these years. And
this is good until project is interesting to broad kind
(goals, tastes) of people involved in it's development.
Exactly... actually I think "the goal" didn't change for everybody,
just for some and we have many dreams, but the core still sticks
together!
The next step is to build Frameworks, then
Appplications. You can create new user with all needed files
inside it's home dir. You can start Login with command
'systemctl start loginwindow' or login to newly created user
from your login application (it should start ~/.xinitrc in
user home dir). That's it.
Some noticeable achievements I've got:
* I integrated Workspace and WindowMaker into Workspace
Manager. That's it - one application. It was made possible
by using libdispatch and libobjc2. For example, when
non-GNUstep application starts Workspace's Processess panel
shows it with info grabbed from WindowMaker. Another
example: when you start application by double-clicking in
File Viewer and appicon already exists in Dock icon fly from
FileViewer's to docked appicon.
* In general Workspace is ready to be NSWorkspace povider.
* GNUstep and WindowMaker unified look and feel (menus and
titlebars, fonts, miniwindows).
* Media management: Workpace automatically mounts removable
media inserted (UDisks integration).
* Terminal: a lot of improvements. It's better to see it.
* -NXAutoLaunch option implemented. Now applications started
with this option doesn't show menu at all. No focus
flickering. Smooth as it should be.
* Preferences: everything you need to set up must be here.
Not only GNUstep NSGlobalDomain options (localization,
fonts) but system specific options also (display, keyboard,
mouse, sound, networking).
* A lot of other things I can't recall now but I write it
down someday. ;)
This sounds great and the screenshots look promising
There are some facts I don't like and want to
change:
* NEXTSPACE is based on quite outdated release of GNUstep
(base 1.24.8, gui and back 0.24.1);
* It is based on ART backend. I want to use Cairo backend
but ART has usefull features (.nfont packages provide
ability to set hinting and antialiasing options on per font
basis).
I understand that! ART continues to be intriguing and it still works
after many years, it is fast, fotns look better and the possibility
of using non-antialiased fonts is just great. They look far better
in Terminal, Code-Editors and for my test also Menus.
* DE needs documentation. I plan to discuss NSHelpPanel
implementation with you guys. First of all we need to define
format for help files.
Indeed, this is a cross-GNUstep issue. We don't have documentation
and the HelpViewer app we had long time ago disappeared into void.
One solution would be to revive it and to use RTF: this would be
cool because you can read and write it with GNUstep tools and it
would be low-resource.
ANother would be to go more apple-like and use HTML, but you need an
external editor and also no native viewer for GNUstep. Maybe in the
future pull in the monstrum of WebKit or it could use SWK if it were
a little more complete. It is capable enough to "almost" display our
GNUstep reference libraries, except for a couple of issues. Might be
worth it.
A discussion worth of a separate thread.
* It is developed and tested on CentOS 7. I have no plans in
near future to port it somewhere else. I need to finish what
I've started first.
Understandable, also your solution looks quite linux tied and
depends on a couple of nasty things, but nevertheless very
interesting for a lot of people.
Clean up headers, copyrights and such. This is very important if you
want your application to be ever packaged in a distribution.
2. Return to development of ProjectCenter. First
of all PC badly needs good editor, then GORM interoperation
and next debugger.
I took over maintainership of ProjectCenter after your leave. I
stabilized the application quite a bit, but not totally.
With hard work I fixed crashers in the editor and improved the class
and syntax parsers. With Gregory we started a debugger, the first
iteration was simple and not portable, the second (not yet released,
it is in GIT) is interesting, but hard to complete and work halted a
bit because of these issues.
If you wish we can sync on that if you are interested.
I hope my work will be useful not only for me but for
GNUstep project also.
A good application is useful for everybody and attracts interest.
Maybe some of your improvements can also directly go into the
application you started from?
E.g. I think we should also have an exchange on Terminal, because I
put quite some work there. I took over a couple of years ago.
Happy Coding,
Riccardo
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