Mastodawn

I've been working on wiring up Firefox build system with Geany so that it can be used as an IDE for development with integration for Rust, C/C++ and Python language servers. For contributors who want a full-blown IDE it's a much better option than Visual Studio Code which is both a resource hog and a security liability.

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Andrew Zonenberg

@gabrielesvelto I really like Geany, although I don't use any of its IDE features personally (I run in non-project mode and just use it as a fancy text editor with regex search/replace, code folding, etc).

It's a nice step up from e.g. gedit without the bloat of something heavy.

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Gabriele Svelto 2d ago

@azonenberg me too, I've always used it as a fancy editor more than anything else. But I realized that it's relatively easy to add our most advanced IDE Integration to it so I went ahead and did it. In a project the size of Firefox the code exploration features of a language server - such as looking up type and function definitions - is a big help for someone who's new to the project.

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Andrew Zonenberg 2d ago

@gabrielesvelto Yeah makes sense. Personally I find all kinds of autocomplete etc annoying because the concept-to-code path in my brain works faster than the visual-to-understanding loop.

So I type void foo( and before I realize the editor has added the closing parenthesis I've already typed one myself and now I have two. Then I have to recognize what happened and backspace over one of them and I end up being slower and less productive.

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Andrew Zonenberg 2d ago

@gabrielesvelto ngscopeclient is probably the biggest codebase I work in in it, and it's a bit over a quarter million lines currently so probably... 100x smaller than firefox?

And as the lead developer and original author of much of the code I'm extremely familiar with where to find things so it's easy to just have tabs open with a class definition and switch back to check on the exact arguments to a method or something.