[MacRuby-devel] PBI - translate TextEdit to MacRuby

[Laurent Sansonetti]

Hi Rich,

(Sorry for the late reply, I was on vacation.)

On Jan 18, 2009, at 1:17 PM, Rich Morin wrote:

> A friend of mine asked:
>
>> What word processor do you use on the Mac? I'd like to
>> find an open-source, lightweight rich text editor (not
>> OpenOffice... too big).  Any suggestions?
>
> His question made me think of a nifty project.  TextEdit
> is one of the canonical example programs in the Mac OS X
> Developer Tools.  It's not all that big, really:
>
> $ cd /Developer/Examples/AppKit/TextEdit/
>
> $ wc -l *.h
>       5 Controller.h
>     124 Document.h
>      26 DocumentController.h
>      11 DocumentPropertiesPanelController.h
>      23 DocumentWindowController.h
>      49 EncodingManager.h
>      11 LinePanelController.h
>      23 MultiplePageView.h
>     100 Preferences.h
>      11 PrintPanelAccessoryController.h
>      14 ScalingScrollView.h
>      16 TextEditErrors.h
>     413 total
>
> $ wc -l *.m
>     140 Controller.m
>    1110 Document.m
>     269 DocumentController.m
>     133 DocumentPropertiesPanelController.m
>     702 DocumentWindowController.m
>       5 Edit_main.m
>     344 EncodingManager.m
>     162 LinePanelController.m
>     209 MultiplePageView.m
>     418 Preferences.m
>      87 PrintPanelAccessoryController.m
>     201 ScalingScrollView.m
>    3780 total
>
> The usual claim is that Ruby is several times smaller than C, C++,
> etc.  Let's assume that a factor of four is typical.  This would
> let TextEdit be recapitulated in 1000 LOC of Ruby.  It would run
> about as fast (most of the work is done in the Apple frameworks)
> and it would be easily extensible in Ruby.  In fact, it could use
> user- or site-specific "libraries" stored in initialization files.
>
> Does anyone else find this notion interesting?

I think this is a valuable effort, if someone is willing to do it. It  
would be a nice sample code.

Laurent