I just up­load­ed ver­sion 0.7 of Mar­ave, my fullscreen text ed­i­tor to http://­mar­ave.­google­code.­com

Mar­ave is a "re­lax­ing" text ed­i­tor in­spired by ommwriter, Dark­Room and many oth­er­s. It com­bines a spar­tan fullscreen UI with a van­ish­ing UI, which gets out of the way of your tex­t.

It sup­ports syn­tax high­light­ing, inine spellcheck­ing, back­ground mu­sic, au­di­ble key­board feed­back, themes, is ex­ten­si­ble via plu­g­in­s, and much more.

Here's a screen­shot:

There are no ma­jor new fea­tures in 0.7, but there are im­por­tant in­ter­nal changes and some ma­jor bugs fixed:

• Fixed bug that broke open­ing files if you had no spellcheck­­er

• Im­­ple­­men­t­ed ba­sic RTL lan­guage sup­­port

• Sev­er­al oth­­er mi­nor fix­es

• Refac­­tored the ed­i­­tor com­po­­nent so it can be reused

I have been think­ing on what I re­al­ly re­al­ly want in a word pro­ces­sor. And then what would it take to cre­ate such a thing.

A few min­utes of play­ing have led me the way of this teas­er (video here if you can't see it):

Could some­thing come out of it? Who knows.

Writ­ing an ed­i­tor is rein­vent­ing the wheel. I know that. I tell my­self Mar­ave is a fine wheel, with dis­tinct fea­tures, and I think that is true, but, if you are rein­vent­ing the wheel, there's no need to rein­vent the axle and the spoke, too.

So, I refac­tored the stuff that I think a text ed­i­tor must pro­vide in­to a nice li­brary, so the next time some­one must in­vent a wheel, he can use Mar­ave's neat spokes and axles:

So, in­tro­duc­ing Ed­i­tor, the most-ob­vi­ous­ly named class ev­er! It's a text edit­ing wid­get for PyQt with ex­tra fea­tures, which you can use as a drop-in re­place­ment for a QTextE­d­it or QPlain­TextE­d­it.

Right now, it lives in­side Mar­ave's SVN but it may even move out some­day.

Here are its fea­tures:

• Syn­­tax high­­­light­ing

  And I don't mean "in the­o­ry", like QTex­tE­d­it and com­­pa­ny do! Ed­i­­tor can high­­­light a bunch of lan­guages, be­­cause it us­es GNU source high­­­light via Loren­­zo Bet­­tini's Source High­­­light Qt.

• Spell check­­ing

  If you have PyEn­chant in­­stalled and the right dic­­tio­­nar­ies, it will do on­­line spellcheck­­ing.

• Search and Search+Re­­place wid­gets

  The Ed­i­­tor class can give you nice wid­gets for search or search and re­­place al­ready hooked with the ed­i­­tor wid­get, so you can add them to your ap­p's UI eas­i­­ly.

• new/open/save/saveas meth­od­s:

  Don't im­­ple­­ment open­ing/sav­ing, etc your­­self! That's al­ways the same code!

Hope­ful­ly this will be help­ful for some­one else :-)

The nice fel­lows at Packt Pub­lish­ing have sent me a copy of Grok 1.0 Web De­vel­op­ment by Car­los de la Guardia to re­view.

I am read­ing it and ex­pect to write about it in a few days (BTW: nice so far! My pro­posed slo­gan: it's like zope, with­out the Ja­va [1]), and here is a sam­ple chap­ter so you can see what it's about. It's easy to read stan­dalone, too:

Chap­ter 5: Forms

Hav­ing had to deal this week with the bro­ken­ness that's Djan­go old­forms (le­ga­cy site, don't even ask), the Grok way of deal­ing with forms is re­fresh­ing ;-)

[1] Yes, of course I know Zope had no Ja­va in it, it just felt like Ja­va ;-)