Coding for Tab Awareness in Bespin

During our last status meeting, I brought up the issue of people not taking tabs (and the fact that they are variable-length characters) into consideration when coding new features that require text manipulation. As a result, I was asked to write a little tutorial on the wiki to help explain the situation to those not familiar with the code.

Take a look at the article. It starts by giving a little background information about the issue. It then makes note of which functions are expecting to be fed modelPos, rather than pos. It then goes on to explain how to obtain the proper position value and other things related to the fact that tabs are variable-length, based upon where they are in a line.

This article outlines the tools that one needs in order to properly consider tabs in text. However, it does not necessarily give step-by-step instructions on how to properly use the code; it has no examples. Is it clear enough to use? Or is there still confusion as to what to do?

Please leave me feedback here, and I’ll make any changes that are necessary to clarify things better. (Alternatively, you could make the edits yourself—it is a wiki, after all—but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that. I mean, I am the one that wrote the original code…. You know, just saying.)

Working on the Cloud

This is just a quick post to note that I have recently been working with the lovely folks in #bespin (including Dion Almaer [dalmaer]) and helping them out with some minor stuff. I’ve filed a few bugs (namely, bug 481486, bug 481511, and bug 478610) and fixed another (bug 478446). The first bug was a quick fix regarding logging in, and was pushed live to bespin.mozilla.com rather quickly in the form of version 0.1.5 (“Nonchalant Nimbus+”). The second bug was actually fixed by another bug, which also fixed a number of bugs I’d noticed and mentioned in the channel, but never officially filed. The third bug still exists, but is probably still over my head, as it requires removing the display of lines in the area where the scrollbars would/should be. And that fourth bug was a quick regular expression fix to add support for plus signs and underscores in the e-mail addresses used to register on a Bespin implementation. The second and fourth bugs are currently only fixed in trunk, and I don’t know what the plan is for pushing them live. The third bug has yet to be fixed.

I’ve also taken the liberty (with dalmaer’s blessing) of porting Bespin’s README.txt file to MozillaWiki as the starting point for the Developer Guide (which was mentioned in the User Guide as an upcoming document). Work still needs to be done to move any relevant content from the User Guide to the Developer Guide, but I’m heading to bed, because I’ve got a plane to catch for home tomorrow afternoon. (Your help in the matter would be greatly appreciated, though!)

I do want to note first, however, that throughout all this I’ve been implicitly testing QA build 2 of Firefox 3.1b3 (to be released next week), and everything seems tip-top at the moment (with 126 tabs open, no less!).