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 Done
    • Move suggestions into a sub-menu Done
    • Fix memleak in language context menu
  • Add API to get list of available languages
  • Add support into finch to remember language used per contact
  • Add ability to change the language for spell checks. Done
• Tiling Window manager
  • Test out ion3, rat poison X tiling window managers Done
  • Compile ideas from X tiling window managers Done
  • Bring proposal to pidgin mailing list Done
  • Splitting/unsplitting Done
  • Rotating through windows Done
  • Moving between frames Done
  • Exchanging windows between frames Done
  • Resizing frames Done
  • Get list of non-visible windows
  • Support for tagging
• GntTextView? widget resizing problems
  • GntTextView? crashes when resizing when the text is scrolled below the bottom.
• Other
  • Demo application for to test tiling window manager and spell checking support
  • GntEntry 'always' support
  • Fix GntMenu? sub-menu up arrow Sadrul took care of this one

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