Like you, I have been really busy the last few weeks on my day job. But now things are getting back to normal for me again, so I should be able to get going on this again.
I am still working on the Simple (or Flat) IDE. I have not been able to figure out why the syntax highlighting for comments is not working correctly. Since this is just a temporary IDE, I don't think I will spin my wheels on that little comment bug any more. I think it is something we can live with for now.
I am going to finish enhancing the Simple IDE so it will allow us to easily work on Lazarus. My plan is to move the Pascal keywords out to a config file (or use the tokens and scanner that the compiler uses). I am going to add a simple Options dialog and save the properties out to an Ini file. I would like to include the compiler directly in the code instead of shelling out to compile, but we will see on that one how much work it will take. If it is easy to do, then I will do it. Otherwise I will leave it the way it is. I also want to add a Search/Replace dialog. It is really hard finding things sometimes without that. Finally, I want to add a Project file that will hold all the project settings.
I don't want to spend too much time on the Simple IDE, but I think it does need to those things added to be really useful. I am working on it right now, so should have something useful soon.
As far as relying on the built in widgets in GTK+, I have not been involved in the component development yet, so I can't answer from experience. But from what I do know, I agree that we should look at implementing them at the glib level. It might take more work, but if it gives us more flexibility, then it would probably be worth it. Wrapping the existing GTK+ widgets will be faster, but it would limit our widgets to their functionality. It could be really difficult to add functionality that way. I like the flexibility to do more.
Curtis
