[isabelle-dev] NEWS: Dockable window "Find"

[Makarius]

On Thu, 19 Sep 2013, Holger Gast wrote:

> On 09/18/2013 11:07 PM, Makarius wrote:
>> On Wed, 18 Sep 2013, Holger Gast wrote:
>>
>>> Well, one more piece of information about Swing gathered. (Not very useful
>>> though: like many people nowadays, I have switched to the much faster and more
>>> modern SWT/JFace for my projects anyway.)
>>
>> I count Eclipse/SWT also as a legacy thing. In any case this is not relevant for
>> Isabelle/jEdit: at the very starting point of that project was the observation
>> that GUI frameworks don't count, but editor frameworks.
> Funny you should say that -- especially in the context of several
> recent threads about layout management, placement of popup windows,
> font management, etc. ;( Obviously, the choice of UI frameworks does
> matter in everyday work on UIs.

I am not sure you have understood much about Isabelle/Scala + jEdit to 
implement "PIDE" -- even after all these years.

All UI frameworks I've seen so far are crap.  A UI framework alone does 
not give you a real editor, you would have to implement that yourself. 
jEdit as editor framework (or quasi IDE) has turned out as somewhere in 
the middle -- it does many things, and for things it does not it is 
reasonably flexible to be adapted (although that is not easy).  Its Swing 
foundations are definitely legacy, but we knew that already from the 
start.  (You were actually the one to see good OO design in Swing and its 
pluggable LAFs.)

If we look today at the factual situation of Prover IDE implementations, 
there is not just Isabelle/jEdit but also Isabelle/Eclipse from Newcastle.

Maybe you want to help them getting SWT into a form that they can catch up 
with the display qualities of Isabelle/jEdit (sub/superscripts, hyperlinks 
and formal markup in tooltips etc.).  I had to bend Java 2D and Swing 
quite a bit to make this work, but it has to be repeated for SWT -- and 
all the portability issues will probably come back once again in a 
different form.


 	Makarius