Builder Update

I've been really busy during the start of the Builder fundraising campaign trying to round up funds. We still have some larger donations planned that I hope to see land in the not to distant future. We are one week of four complete and have raised nearly 60% of the requested funds!

This means that I haven't got to write as much code the last week as I would have liked, but our contributors have picked up the slack.

For a New Years gift, I put together some tools for those of you that work with HTML. The auto indentation engine now supports HTML, so you wont need to fuss about with alignments anymore. Just hit enter after your opening element and you'll be properly indented. I also added the basis for what will be the HTML autocompletion engine. It's not very complete yet, but if someone wants to own it, I'd be happy to hand it off. Longer term, I'd prefer to see it work of the document's DTD.

Search within the code editor has vastly improved. I implemented "rubberbanding" so that as you search the editor will scroll forwards to the next match. If you escape out of the search, you are quickly returned to your previous position in the editor. This makes looking ahead just for a moment a breeze. VIM users will know the parallel to this feature as "incremental search".

Search also gained functionality to move forwards and backwards using the arrow keys. Simply start searching and press either Up or Down keys to navigation through your documents matches.

We now support separate keyboard shortcuts when you have VIM enabled. This means that we can use a more reasonable set of shortcuts for users that do not use VIM mode. Previously, we had to be very careful due to clashing shortcuts.

The preferences window has gotten type-to-search functionality. Just start typing and the search entry will be focused to filter the available options.

I spent some time fine-tuning the interaction with auto-insertion of matching braces such as () [] {} and "". We try to be smarter about getting out of your way in strings and comments, no matter what the language.

Igor Gnatenko added support for AppStream data. This means once packages land in distributions you'll be able to select Builder from GNOME Software as well as other "stores".

Megh Parikh added support for Github flavored markdown. You'll see that advanced markdown features like tables now work.

The VIM engine got a couple of improvements as well. I'm really interested in hearing how people like this feature. We don't implement a couple of VIM features (marks and registers for example), but I don't know how widely used they are by the vast majority of users.

Michael Catanzaro patched up our menus to be more HIG compliant.

I added a new "Generate Support Log" menu item that can be used to help us track down your bugs. It will generate a log file with things like environment variables, library versions, and other helpful debugging information.

Fabiano Fidêncio simplified the file opening experience. We now leave you in the previous directory you opened a file from. Longer term, I hope that we can negate the need to use the Open dialog at all. But until global search is up to par, this will do :)

We had a very difficult to track down crasher that was fixed last week. Thanks to Fabiano Fidêncio for being patient while I tracked it down!

For those unlucky enough to need to run off remote filesystems such as sshfs , we've improved inter-activeness for you. Lot's of git operations have moved off the main thread (oops!) and now things feel generally snappy.

Happy Hacking!

-- Christian Hergert 2015-01-06

Back to Index