GSoC2008: Finch Improvements

Student: Mark Schneider

Goals

Finch currently lacks some features that its bigger brother, the GTK-based, Pidgin front end have available. One goal of this project is to incorporate spell-checking support into Finch. This can perhaps be done through the addition of a library similar to GtkSpell? but for Finch's GUI toolkit, libgnt. The second goal of this project is to add a tiling window manager to Finch. A tiling window manager will allow for the user to organize open windows into a set of non-overlapping frames, providing a more controller windowing environment. The third goal is to provide some enhancements to the GntTextView? widget provided by libgnt. Currently, there are some issues with handling the resizing of the GntTextView? widget's width that would be nice to address.

To-Do

• Spell checking support to libgnt
  • Clean up word locating functions in GntEntry
  • Keep track of word being edited and only highlight when user is done editing it unless it was misspelled and gone back to
  • Add ability to correct misspellings using suggestions drop down
  • Add API to change spelling language
  • Add support into finch to remember language used per contact
• Tiling Window manager
  • Test out ion3, rat poison X tiling window managers
  • Compile ideas from X tiling window managers
  • Bring proposal to pidgin mailing list
• GntTextView? widget resizing problems
  • GntTextView? crashes when resizing when the text is scrolled below the bottom.
• Multi-line support to the GntEntry widget
• Other
  • GntEntry 'always' support

Project Deliverables

1. Simple test application utilizing libgnt
2. Finch spell checking library/plugin
3. Tiling window manager configuration documentation
4. Finch tiling window manager library
5. Improved GntTextView? widget