[kepler-dev] [Bug 3191] New: - Merge TextEditor changes with ptII source

[bugzilla-daemon@ecoinformatics.org]

http://bugzilla.ecoinformatics.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3191

           Summary: Merge TextEditor changes with ptII source
           Product: Kepler
           Version: 1.0.0beta3
          Platform: Other
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: actors
        AssignedTo: cxh at eecs.berkeley.edu
        ReportedBy: leinfelder at nceas.ucsb.edu
         QAContact: kepler-dev at ecoinformatics.org
OtherBugsDependingO 3185,3186,3187
             nThis:


These changes from src/exp in Kepler should be included in the ptII tree:
src/exp/ptolemy/gui 
        Query.java 
        UndoListener.java
src/exp/ptolemy/actor/gui 
        TextEditorTableau.java
        TextEditor.java

Christopher Brooks is aware of these changes.  See his email below:
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These changes sound reasonable to me for the ptII devel trunk.

There is a similar bug that came out of discussions with Ian:
"Editing Python Scripts is difficult"
https://chess.eecs.berkeley.edu/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=138

There is this larger question though:  We could spend effort on trying
to make a good editor out of TextEditor, or we could solve this
problem in other ways.
I see several possibilities:
1) Enhance TextEditor et al.
    - This is not much effort, but developing a full editor is real work.
    Edward and I did this with Tycho using Tcl/Tk.  The problem is
    that people want more and more features (syntax highlighting,
    syntax checking, jump from stack trace)

2) Find something better and add it to the ptII tree
    - More work, but we end up with something that is probably so so.

3) Provide an interface to an arbitrary editor (Netbeans, Eclipse, Emacs)
    - The interface to Emacs sort of works
    - I'm not sure if this is possible for Netbeans and Eclipse
4) Interface to something like Netbeans or Eclipse
    - This is lots of work, and ties us to one program.  However, it
    seems like an eventual goal.

Anyway, enhancing TextEditor seems reasonable.

There are also issues concerning modal dialogs.  Personally, I really
don't like the modal dialog we use for editing parameters.  It makes
it impossible to compare parameters between two actors.  However, 
because of various reasons surrounding parameter evaluation, we have
modal dialogs.  It sounds like we are talking about leaving the Python
code open as a non-modal window?  My concern here is that this might
cause other problems.  I'm not sure about this though.

Anyway, I say go for checking the changes in.  These changes will
probably not appear in the ptII rel-7-0-beta-2 branch.  I'm only
folding bug fixes into the rel-7-0-beta-2 branch.  This is a rather
nice enhancment, not a bug in current functionality.  That said, we
could start a ptII branch for these and other enhancements that would
be used as for the Kepler 1.0 release.

_Christopher
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