News from the past — gpicker 2 is out!

I've released gpicker 2.0 more than half year ago. And I planned to write about it since then. Lack of time and lazyness delayed that more and more. But some people outside of my immediate 'circle of influence' are now using it for some very creative things. And I cannot wait anymore. It's time to realize my plan at last! :)

So gpicker 2.0 is out and it has some nice improvements. All new features are detailed in README file. But I'd like to describe the most important things here.

When I announced gpicker, the project didn't even had a home. It's official home now is here: http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/gpicker.

gpicker became even faster. Loading and filtration were moved into separate threads, so that UI is always ultra-responsive. With speed improvements and separated filtration (which nicely aborts/restarts when user changes filter) it's now very responsive even on my whole filesystem which has more than 1E6 files.

supermegadoc and erlang docs

Perhaps the most significant improvement is ability to select from arbitrary list. gpicker is very good at selecting files, but you can feed it list of arbitrary strings via standard input. And I have quite interesting use of that feature – supermegadoc. This thing indexes man pages, ri, devhelp & erlang documentation and allows you to quickly choose and open documentation you need. But it's also quite useful for exploration of documentation. You can try typing various words and see if there's anything like that in documentation. I found it especially helpful for getting up to speed with Erlang standard library. I also did some very basic imenu & tags completer for Emacs which is based on this feature too.

Another area of improvement is gpicker integration. VIM integration (contributed by Sergey Avseyev) is included in gpicker distribution. And we also have plug-ins for netbeans (by Sergey Avseyev) and for gedit  (by Yury Tolstik).

We also have some support for building/running on OSX. But unfortunately it's not very easy (with limited Internet & OSX access I have) to get proper installation of Gtk+ on OSX. The canonical way seems to be building from source via jhbuild. But gpicker-on-OSX work was done against ancient distribution of Gtk+ which is long withdrawn from web. So any success/failure reports with proper Gtk+ installation as well as contributions in this area are very much welcomed. I expect, that only minor configure.ac fixes should be required at most. Contributing pre-built osx binaries is very much appreciated too. This can be done by Bundler.

Yet another improvement is ability to build gpicker without Gtk+ and glib. This flavor of gpicker doesn't have any GUI, obviously. But it's able to filter standard input against filter specified via command line, which should be enough for some useful things. Some people, for example, would like to have gpicker-like functionality with text-mode Emacs. gpicker-simple can help here. In fact I did some very preliminary (and buggy) integration of gpicker-simple filtration and IDO user-interface. If anyone is interested in making this work, please contribute. You can find it in gpicker.el from gpicker distribution.

The creative work by other people I mentioned before is a very interesting idea of switching windows by auto-completing their names (and other info) in gpicker. See Switch Window Using Fuzz Matching :: DoIT for more info.

I'm very glad that I can say thank you to people that helped with code (Sergey & Yura) and/or bug reports/suggestions (folks from Ruby department at Altoros). I'm happy that I have some users outside of Altoros. In particular, Marcelo De Moraes Serpa has been very helpful with suggestions and spreading the word. Thank you very much guys!

I thought that gpicker would take over the world, it's awesome after all, but my (not evil at all) plan utterly failed. This is a bit unfortunate :) But I'm very glad that gpicker is slowly getting some adoption. The future is bright!