Task-oriented desktop and applications?

I wanted to add a comment to Allan’s blog post The next big thing, but too late! comments are already closed (side note, I think it’s a general problem on blogs.gnome.org or it’s a WordPress issue, or both).

So, at Flock 2014, Langdon White talked about “Fedora for Developers” (video), with the following idea, among other things: Desktop integration with “tasks” (with saved state).

It reminded me about a discussion that I had with gedit developers back in 2011. We talked about profiles: being able to create different gedit profiles, for example one for the C language and one for Vala. Different gedit instances could be launched with different profiles. They would behave as independent apps, with different settings, different plugins activated, a different UI state, and so on. Of course a profile could be created for each programming project, or… task.

But a task often involves launching several applications. So to resume a complete task quickly, in one step, it either needs some desktop integration, or another application could be responsible to create tasks and resume them. But either way it needs coordination with applications.

gspell news

  • gspell is now fully hosted on gnome.org!
  • There is now a mailing list.
  • In addition to LaTeXila, gspell is now also used by gedit (5,800 lines removed, yay!).
  • The 0.1.x version has branched and is meant to be installed alongside GNOME 3.18.
  • If everything goes fine, the 1.0 version will be released at the same time as GNOME 3.20, with a stable API.

API reviews are more than welcome!

Stay tuned.

Announcing gCSVedit, a simple text editor to edit CSV files

As part of my job at the Université Catholique de Louvain, one of my projects is to develop gCSVedit, a small and simple text editor to edit CSV/TSV files.

gCSVedit is now a free/libre software (GPLv3+ license) and is hosted on GitHub.

Other delimiter-separated values (DSV) files are supported, not just comma-separated values (CSV) files, but “CSV” is more commonly used to refer to that kind of file.

Screenshot of gCSVedit
gCSVedit with the columns aligned. Note also the gray bullets to represent the spaces present in the file.

Why developing a new application for editing CSV files?

CSV files can already be opened in a spreadsheet software like LibreOffice Calc and Gnumeric. But it’s not really user-friendly. Just to open the file you need to provide tons of options:

Screenshot of opening a CSV file with LibreOffice Calc
Opening a CSV file with LibreOffice Calc

A general-purpose text editor like gedit is not the best choice either, because the columns are not aligned. There are some plugins for Eclipse or other IDEs available, but launching and using a complete IDE just to view or edit a CSV file is not user-friendly either.

The best is a specialized application, to do just one thing but do it well. With a user interface that goes straight to the point.

Spreadsheet or text editor?

With a text editor, all characters are visible, including the delimiters. We have thus a greater control. When writing a script to extract the data contained in the file, it’s important to view every character in case of problems (like an extra separator in the data but not for the column titles).

Also, some software that generate CSV files sometimes also include an header, i.e. some text before the actual CSV fields. With a text editor, the header can be shown in a natural way.

Future plans

Create an xdg-app for GNU/Linux. And implement more features of course!

Hopefully in the future it’ll be possible to re-use more code of gedit, to have a decent text editor (although gCSVedit is already completely usable).

So, nothing revolutionary here, it’s a small project. But I think it can bring a better usability. Comments, questions?

PS: to show where are the real spaces (those present in the file, not those added for the alignment), I’ve already contributed to GtkSourceView and GTK+. There will maybe be more contributions in the future, for example to implement a utility to insert virtual spaces, i.e. the text editor should behave as if the added spaces didn’t exist. Or, finally implement rectangular selection in GtkTextView.

Edit: gCSVedit has moved several times where it was hosted, I’ve updated the above URLs.