We are proud to announce the last beta of Pida 0.6. If no severe bugs will show up, Pida 0.6.0 will be release in the next two weeks. Please report bugs you find here.

It was a long time since beta2 and a lot of changes happened since then:

Core Highlights

• multiprocessing language plugins

Language plugins can now use a multiprocessing infrastructure which allows expensive operations to be done on other cpu cores. This increases the speed of plugins like python_lint and python dramatically and do not make the gui sluggish anymore.

• project file caches

Projects now have a filecache which allows fast queries to filenames and filetypes. The QuickOpen? plugin provides a gui for this, allowing the user to open files to which parts of the name, path or filetype are known

• very precise feature selection from LanguagePlugins?
• better filemonitor support
• new documentation (needs some gui work tho)
• lot of speedups
• lot of usability enhancements
• lots and lots of fixes

New Plugins

• RegexpToolkit? - helps you develop and analyze regular expressions
• QuickOpen? - fast file opener for project files
• WayPoint? - autogenerates waypoints when you surf and edit files and allows to jump back and forth

Known Issues

• Unstable on Ubuntu Jaunty

Add proposed package feeds and complain  here for their stubbornness

Fixed on trunk

• Wrong display of changed files
• Better documentation build and api docs
• Hard lockups when pida shows a dialog
• Maybe RuntimeErrors? at external plugins

As Pida was started, there where two choices for the Toolkit in use. Gtk and Qt3 where available and gtk was the better choice at that time.

The years passed and so did the choices changed. The development on Gtk was rather slow compared to Qt and with the Qt4 a really major step was done which shifted the best choice to Qt.

Also looking at the available text widgets the choices are even more clear. GtkSourceView? got only very little improvement while with kate and other widgets are getting much improvement — while development on medit started stalling.

Now, while we are at it, why switch from one toolkit to another and not use the oportunity to make things right. So, the overall plan is to separate the gui elements from the logic first, and then start implementing a second gui in Qt.

With the XEmbed support in both toolkits, it as already possible to mix widgets with each other, but using it is rather ugly. For example can widget not be reparented without breaking the connection, but both run in the same main loop, which is a good thing.

As Qt does not provide such a cool widget as we use for the main window currently, this needs to be implemented first. Best would be in C++ so other projects could use it, too.

Investigation showed however, that it seems not to be impossible that a real mixing of widgets can be accomplished. We are already in the same mainloop on a X-Server at least. The best thing would be if we would find a way to use gtk widgets in a qt application.

This redesign is planned for the 0.7 release and 0.6 will become a long living gtk branch.

The website got some face-lifting recently. Changing to a trac only site allows us to easier manage the site. Also the site moved to a new server so things might be broken.

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