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#51 Browser preview

closed
None
5
2011-01-11
2010-09-22
Anonymous
No

Is it possible to implement a browser preview for html files like in Aptana ? I really missed that feature when i switched from aptana to Geany. I'm sure alot of developers will appreciate the plugin if you make it!

Discussion

  • dmaphy

    dmaphy - 2010-09-22

    I disagree with this. Geany is a development environment or rather an extended text editor. However, it's surely not a web browser and even a plugin with one rendering engine in the backend could not be as good as testing web pages with different web browsers manually - as I always do. Or in short: I wouldn't use such plugin.

     
  • frlan

    frlan - 2010-09-29

    I agree on the I wouldn't use. But I could imagine that its possible to implement using webkit/gecko bindings in someway. But same, most likely I will not build it :D

     
  • Adrian Dimitrov

    Adrian Dimitrov - 2010-10-21

    Also disagree, and supports dmaphy`s comment, as web developer I doesn`t use such options and think that they are stupid. Geany is programming editor not wysiwyg editor.

     
  • Anonymous

    Anonymous - 2010-10-22

    It seems like you guys havent coded a web page design without wysiwyg :D Nowadays all web designs include multiple images and tons of css, that needs a lot of tweaking. It's really annoying to save the file, hit alt+tab (or switch desktops) and hit refresh on the web browser. Imagine that you have to align a box next to another one and you need to position it by the pixel. You'll switch to the browser reload the page and switch back to Geany atleast 5-10 times. It's a MUST HAVE feature :)

     
  • Colomban Wendling

    I personally think such feature might be interesting, and it's easy to do with WebKitGTK.
    Actually, I would have used it last days when I was playing with a style without clear goal, so I just tried stuff and see whether it "looked good" (does this color really look good? is this border style a good idea?).

    But I don't think it is for what you speak of in your last comment: positioning stuff pixel-by-pixel is something that should not be done visually. It must be done the right way by thinking, and then checked in the different browsers for actual results.

    BTW, I had a few hours and I just wrote a small plugin for this (actually it took me about half an hour to get it to work, and... more to play with details :D), I attach it here. It depends on Geany >= 0.20 SVN and WebKitGTK.
    Note that this is NOT meant to be a web browser, so it has very minimalistic features: shows a web page, allows to reload it, and reloads it automatically when a file get saved.

    Also note that even though I wrote it and I think it can be useful, I think that loading a web browser in a text editor is not really something to always do; so I think it should probably be disabled when not used.
    Also be warned: this plugin will probably not be my priority, so if you want more and more from it, you'll either have to wait or to start hacking on it: patch are welcome! :)

    If nobody see a problem about this, I could add it to the geany-plugins repository.

    Finally, if you want to continue to speak about this I suggest you to mail to a Geany ML (geany-devel I guess, but perhaps geany is fine), it would be really more convenient IMO.

     
  • Colomban Wendling

    Ah and BTW, you can't install the plugin automatically for now, use this command from the build directory:
    $ ./libtool --mode install install -m 755 ./.libs/libgeany-web-preview.so $HOME/.config/geany/plugins/

     
  • Colomban Wendling

    Hum, there's a strange segfault *after* unloading of the plugin. Seems to be related to WebKit's threads, but I don't know why yet. Strange because it didn't happened in first ties and now it happens everytime, and neither GDB nor Valgrind seems to help.

     
  • Nobody/Anonymous

    Hi again,

    I forgot to update the status here, sorry.
    The crash is fixed, and I've added WebKit's web inspector support, so it's not really a simple preview anymore since it provides some web analysis and debugging tools -- thanks to WebKit.

    So I join an updated tarball. Note that I renamed the thing from geany-web-preview to geany-web-helper.

     
  • Colomban Wendling

    A small plugin to display a webpage that gets reloaded upon document saving as well as some web debugging tools (aka web inspector)

     
  • Colomban Wendling

    Just to mention, the plugin can now be found in the Geany-Plugin repository, under the name "webhelper".

    (previous message was from me too, sorry)

     
  • Colomban Wendling

    • assigned_to: nobody --> colombanw
    • status: open --> closed
     
  • Colomban Wendling

    I'm closing this one since the plugin now exists (webhelper).