View Source: search support

[sascha_silbe]

It would be very useful to be able to search inside the "View Source" window.

[timclicks]

Update - Implementation notes:

Gtk.TextIter

Returns a tuple of line number, start & stop position.

gtksourceview2.Buffer.forward_iter_to_source_mark

is an implementation within the gtksourceview module.

Problems

Non-greedy search. Stops after encountering the first match.

[timclicks]

Replying to timclicks:

Problems::
Non-greedy search. Stops after encountering the first match.

This isn't actually correct. There function stops at an optional limit. So this approach looks fine to use.

<silbe> timClicks: can you time-bound gtksourceview2.iter_forward_search(), e.g. by letting it search only up to a maximum distance / certain point in the text?
<timClicks> yes
<timClicks> it has a limit argument
<timClicks> i'll check, but I'm fairly certain it's byte-bound, not time-bound
<silbe> timClicks: then my first suggestion would be to run it (if necessary repeatedly) in the "idle" loop.
<silbe> timClicks: doing it this way evades almost all of the pitfalls of multithreading / multiprocessing
<timClicks> i see
<timClicks> does that loop only do something if nothing else requests cpu time?
* timClicks thinks of boinc/seti@home as an analogy
<silbe> timClicks: if you like, you can measure the time the call took and tweak the number of bytes, or call it repeatedly until the time limit is reached. The only important thing is to bound the maximum time it takes well enough to make the GUI feel responsive.
<timClicks> i see
<timClicks> i wanted the gui to be such that you didn't need to hit Ctrl+F
<timClicks> e.g. if you have view source open, you start typing
<timClicks> once you push esc, the string clears
<silbe> timClicks: it's called whenever the GUI main loop is "idle" (i.e. not processing user actions or invoking callbacks); it doesn't depend on the behaviour of other processes or threads.
<silbe> timClicks: ah, so iterative search. very nice.
<silbe> timClicks: oh, and please change to cursor (tomeu posted a link on sugar-devel some days ago) while it's searching / doing highlighting in the background so the user knows the input was accepted

[smparrish]

timclicks can you provide an update as to where you are with this.

[timclicks]

Replying to smparrish:

timclicks can you provide an update as to where you are with this.

smparrish I haven't updated anything since the last comment. Feel free to take over.