this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
65 points (94.5% liked)

Linux

48328 readers
589 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

For the past few months I have been working on a simple windows notepad like text editor. It's nothing special, but when I first switched to linux I looked around and it took me a while to find leafpad. Unlike leafpad however, Janus uses gtk3, a much more modern toolkit then gtk2, it can display and modify binary data, and it can highlight code syntax for most popular languages. Feel free to check it out on the github.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] satyrn@lemmy.world 14 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

The main thing is that gtk3 is a little more stable and available for now. Gtk deprecates tons of functions seemingly at random, and I don't want to have to constantly re-code my project as they deprecate things. As for availability, Gtk3 is shipped everywhere as 3.24 rather than different distros having different versions, gtksourceview4 is shipped on older distributions then gtksourceview5 (meaning more compatibility), and if I ever wanted to port to other operating systems Gtk4 would be much harder than 3. Finally, before the starting Janus I was under the impression that no gtk4 apps could be themed, but I have since learned that that is not the case. Knowing what I do now, once they iron out more of the kinks I will definitely port to gtk4, but first I want to make sure everything works well.

As for binary editing, I took a very different approach to other editors. Most either convert the binary data to a code page (very confusing and nearly impossible to edit) or use escape characters, which is not a bad solution by any means but looks increasingly worse with the entropy of the data. I eventually came up with this approach, which I think maintains the simplicity of a notepad editor while allowing the functionality I meant to include.

[–] boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net 4 points 7 months ago

Very interesting, thanks for the anwer!