Tao of the Machine

Picking up steam

Seems more people are taking an interest in Kaa. Today an ex-colleague of mine mailed me and said he downloaded it. I also got a request to write an article about it, for PyZine.

Knowing this, I should probably leave Kaa as it is, a weblogging tool, and save more ambitious goals for future projects. And yes, there will be a 0.9. Any ideas what I should put in there? Drop me a mail or leave a comment...

Posted by Hans Nowak on 2002-11-06 00:01:17 {link}
Categories: Kaa

Pmw troubles

Running into serious problems with Pmw. The documentation is good, but the widgets simply don't do what I want.

I wanted a tabbed notebook with a Text widget on each page. The text of the tab should be set to the filename (stripped from path and drive indicator) we're editing in that Text widget. So far, so good. I have a prototype that loads and saves files and it works well. However, problems occurred when trying to implement "save as". If I save a file under a different name, then the tab should display the new name.
How to do this though? There's no method to rename it. There's an attribute _pageNames, but the name suggests that I better stay away from it unless I know what I'm doing. So I tried destroying a page and creating a new one with the new name, keeping the same Text widget. Doesn't work; the text editor cannot be assigned to a new parent. (Or can it? I'm unfamiliar with this kind of Tkinter arcana.) What about changing the text of the tab directly, then, without touching any internal names? Cool, but the tab doesn't resize, and I don't know how to resize it (or whether it's possible at all).

So I thought about using a different method to select pages in the notebook. (I would need to anyway because you can only have so many tabs, after that their text is squished away.) Using an OptionMenu? Sure, that might work, but it just looks plain stupid. Maybe one of those comboboxes would be a better idea...

I'm more and more tempted to use wxPython for this one. I can use unlimited tabs, file dialogs, etc. Hmm.

Posted by Hans Nowak on 2002-11-03 23:30:01 {link}
Categories: Python

Fed up

I got fed up with my new keyboard, so I put the old one back in place.
I got fed up with WindowBlinds (too slow), so I removed that as well.
Then I got fed up with the lack of good IDEs for Python. So I decided to write one. :-)

Seriously folks, I'm probably not the right person to do this (given my goldfish-like 20-seconds attention span and all that), but it's worth a try. I have big plans for this, but it could very well turn out to be a big failure. So, for now, all I'm going to say is that I started writing an editor for my own use. Some of the less lofty goals are that it should be easy to use, and that it should be easily extendable and expandable. (In Python that is.) It should be a bit like in Kaa, in that I want it to reach a useable status quickly, and then start using it, adding new features when I see fit.

Why not use vi or emacs (shudder)? vim is cool, but my major gripe with it is that if I open 20 files, I have 20 windows floating around. The Windows taskbar doesn't make it easy to see the filename. Unfortunately, vim doesn't use a tabbed notebook or something, so I want an editor that does.

Styles of Beyond

The site of Styles of Beyond's label, Spytech Records, cannot be reached, but there's Megadef. It was not so easy to find out what happened to the group; they were supposed to release their next album "Terraform" last year, but it never saw the light of day, and then I read that they broke up in early 2002. But now they're claimed to be back together again, and the album "Megadef" is expected in early 2003. Hmmz.

Posted by Hans Nowak on 2002-11-02 16:27:41 {link}
Categories: music

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