What will be new in 1.5

My original plan to release some minor update to 1.4 didn’t pan out very well, to be honest. Once again I couldn’t resist the call of new features, and I did significantly more than I wanted to do. Which means that I’m just testing version 1.5 which doesn’t contain many new visible changes, however it provides a way to author plug-ins. As a proof of concept (and a guide for anyone who would like to write one) I extracted file exporters to separate plug-ins (so now there is separate plug-in for each export format Naracea supports, and it should be trivial to write more, if there is demand for that) and I prepared one sample plug-in which generates couple of paragraphs of lorem ipsum, just to show how to extend UI (this plug-in is not part of .exe installation, because it is… well, quite dumb, however you will be able to get your hands on it if you download .zip installer).

Plug-ins do not require any special installation, just copy them to application installation folder and restart the app. To get rid of plug-in, just delete the .dll. Sure, things can get little bit more tricky when plug-in depends on some 3rd party assemblies, so perhaps I’ll introduce a way to manage this kind of conflicts, but right now things can be kept simple.

So, if you want to take a look on plug-in interfaces, visit Naracea.Plugins repository.

Now, all this is pretty boring, and I probably wouldn’t go from 1.4 to 1.5, if there wasn’t something more. And the one more thing thing is one new plug-in which I’ve written. And that plug-in is Python scripting engine.

Sure, I understand this is not something revolutionary, because there are plenty of editors which can be scripted in various programming languages (and also writing Python scripts to do things with text editor has appeal for limited audience), but well, it is still really exciting to write a script and… well, see it running.

For me scripting is a natural way to extend Naracea’s functionality, mainly because I don’t need to compile and build and package whole application for one little missing piece of functionality. I just write a script, test it, and here we go, I’ve got a new function.

Anyway. There is a bit of UI related to Python scripting, which is quite obvious. Scripts need to be stored in Naracea’s application data folder, and you can open that folder from UI. Plug-in creates Naracea document configured to have Pyhon syntax highlighting and exporting everything to the right place with .py extension, but you don’t need to use it — just copy your scripts into folder and click refresh.

Currently I’m testing the whole thing, and tuning couple of other minor features I implemented, so I expect 1.5 release to be available in couple of weeks. Stay tuned!