Ver­sion 0.2 of Mar­ave, a dis­trac­tion-free fullscreen ed­i­tor is out at http://­mar­ave.­google­code.­com

This ver­sion in­cludes sev­er­al bugs fixed and fea­tures im­ple­ment­ed since 0.1.1:

• A cor­rup­t­ed Right-click menu (Is­­sue 20)

• Flick­­er­ing on back­­­ground changes

• More de­­tailed li­­cen­s­ing in­­­for­­ma­­tion

• More test­ed on Win­­dows

• Added help (F1)

• Search & Re­­place (but re­­place all is not done)

• New art­­work

• Sta­­tus no­ti­­fi­­ca­­tions

• Doc­u­­ment In­­­fo (C­tr­l+I)

• Bet­ter feed­back in the UI el­e­­ments (spe­­cial­­ly the but­­ton­s)

• Save font size cor­rec­t­­ly

• Fix "S­­tarts in the back­­­ground" prob­lem (Is­­sue 17)

Mar­ave is free soft­are re­leased un­der the GPL, and should work in all ma­jor desk­top plat­form­s.

I would love feed­back on this re­lease, as well as ideas for Mar­ave's fu­ture, so a mail­ing list for Mar­ave has been opened:

http://­group­s.­google.­com/­group/­mar­ave-dis­cuss

Of course, if you like Mar­ave, feel free to give me mon­ey

The first "good" ver­sion of Mar­ave my re­lax­ing text ed­i­tor is out!

What is Mar­ave?

Mar­ave is an ed­i­tor that does­n't dis­tract you. It has a fullscreen in­ter­face, and most of the time, while you write, you will on­ly see your tex­t, and maybe a back­ground:

Of course it is al­so quite con­fig­urable:

Some of the fea­tures:

• Cus­­tom back­­­grounds (im­ages or col­ors)

• Font and font size are con­­fig­urable

• Re­­size­able ed­i­­tor of con­­fig­urable opac­i­­ty

• "Van­ish­ing" UI, when you tipe, it all goes away

• Op­­tion­al me­­dia play­er (right now aimed at stream­ing au­­dio, maybe sound­s­capes some­­day)

• Op­­tion­al au­­dio feed­back for the key­board (just in case you miss the old type­­writer)

• Theme sup­­port

• Mul­ti­lin­gual spellcheck­­ing (re­quires pyen­chan­t)

Mar­ave is im­ple­ment­ed us­ing PyQt, so it should work in all ma­jor plat­form­s, Win­dows, Lin­ux and Mac OS­X, as long as you have PyQt in­stalled.

In the fu­ture, easy to use bi­na­ries will be pro­vid­ed for Win­dows and Mac.

This ver­sion is not fea­ture com­plete. Specif­i­cal­ly:

• Search+Re­­place is not done

• There may be some cus­­tomiza­­­tions not im­­ple­­men­t­ed

Down­load Mar­ave 0.1

UP­DATE 0.2 is out, at http://­code.­google.­com/p/­mar­ave/­down­load­s/list

An­nounce­men­t:

Mar­ave (noth­ing, in guaraní) is a re­laxed text ed­i­tor. Its goal is to let you fo­cus in your writ­ing, free of vis­ual dis­trac­tions and clut­ter.

It is writ­ten us­ing PyQt, so it should work in all ma­jor plat­form­s, and it is li­censed un­der the GPLv2 so it is free soft­ware.

You can find the cur­rent SVN (no re­lease yet) at http://­mar­ave.­google­code.­com

Screen­shot­s:

Sta­tus:

It's not fin­ished yet, but it has the fol­low­ing fea­tures:

• You can ed­it text

• Min­i­­mal­is­tic, "van­ish­ing" us­er in­­ter­­face

• (Op­­tion­al) au­­dio feed­back for the key­board

• (Op­­tion­al) re­lax­ing mu­sic (re­quires in­­ter­net ac­cess)

• You can cus­­tom­ize the back­­­ground, font, colours, and sounds

• Live spell check­­ing (re­quires pyen­chan­t)

There are al­so some ma­jor miss­ing fea­tures:

• Search and Search/Re­­place is not im­­ple­­men­t­ed

• UI cus­­tomiza­­­tions are not stored

• UI has to be cleaned up a lot more

• It does­n't ask to save when clos­ing

• Au­­tosave not im­­ple­­men­t­ed

And at least one known bug:

• In win­­dows the wid­gets are not well placed Fixed in SVN

A litte his­to­ry:

A few days ago, I saw ommwrit­er men­tioned in a tweet or some­thing sim­i­lar.

I was think­ing "nice thing", but in the back of my mind I was al­so think­ing "that can't be too hard to do". Af­ter al­l, the hard part of cre­at­ing a pro­gram is mak­ing it do things, right?

Well, yes and no. I did man­age to cre­ate a some­what rea­son­able fac­sim­i­le in a day, but tweak­ing the looks of it is driv­ing me nuts :-)

Since yes­ter­day this blog is ten years old so, time for some his­to­ry.

It all start­ed in ad­voga­to where you could still read it to­day! (Please read it here in­stead ;-)

Then it moved to PyDS an ear­ly python desk­top blog plat­form with a web in­ter­face, and was host­ed in PyC­S, a free ser­vice.

Then PyCS kin­da died, and I start­ed gen­er­at­ing a stat­ic blog and host­ing it in my IS­P's free host­ing. That sucked bad.

Then I start­ed my own com­pa­ny, and I had my own server­s, so I start­ed host­ing it there (even to­day this blog is com­plete­ly stat­ic HTM­L!)

Then PyDS start­ed act­ing weird, so I wrote my own blog­ging soft­ware, which is a re­al mess, per­haps 25% fin­ished, but it does things ex­act­ly the way I like them.

Cur­rent­ly, this blog is syn­di­cat­ed in Plan­e­ta PyAr, Plan­et Python, Plan­et Qt, Plan­e­ta LUGLI, and a cou­ple oth­er places.

This year, I de­cid­ed to make the blog com­plete­ly bilin­gual (English and Span­ish), but I hate trans­lat­ing it.

Ac­cord­ing to the stats I have avail­able, the blog is in av­er­age more pop­u­lar now than ev­er (but yes, my most pop­u­lar posts were years ago ;-)

These are the most pop­u­lar pages in the last year:

• PyQt By Ex­am­­ple

  Each of the parts of this se­ries is in the top ten most vis­it­ed pages. So, I re­al­­ly need to write more in this area since it seems to be what brings peo­­ple to the site.

• Re­spond­ing to ran­­dom blog post­s.

  A post ex­­plain­ing how an­oth­er blog­ger is wrong. I think I make a good point, even if it's a bit cheap as a way to bring read­­er­s.

• Queue Man­age­­ment for Qmail

  Oldie but good­ie... not re­al­­ly use­­ful nowa­­days.

• How to make your own dis­­tro

  Yikes, peo­­ple, stop read­­ing this, it's just wrong :-(

• Python Keyring is se­ri­ous­­ly nice

  Fi­­nal­­ly some­thing re­­cen­t!

• What I do for a liv­ing

  An­oth­er new post, I like it a lot.

• The Lin­ux Boot­ing Process Un­veiled

  A di­­dac­tic post. I think it's still the bet­ter ex­­pla­­na­­tion on the sub­­­ject I've seen around, if I may say so my­­self. For ex­­tra irony points, my cur­rent dis­­tro does­n't fol­low this.

• Cre­at­ing pre­sen­­ta­­tions us­ing re­struc­­tured text

  An­oth­er not-­­so-old post, I do this a lot :-)

• Cus­­tom wid­gets us­ing PyQt

  This is al­­most 6 years old, for a de­p­re­­cat­ed ver­­sion of PyQt, and is com­­plete­­ly bro­ken for cur­rent ver­­sion­s. Stop read­­ing this.

Lesson­s:

1. I need to write more about Qt and/or start flame­wars with clue­­less IT writ­ers

2. I need to search for an­­cient ma­te­ri­al and de­p­re­­cate it

3. Hav­ing your own host­ing and blog­ging soft­­ware is neat

4. 10 years is a lot of time: 860 posts (or 913, de­pend­ing on how you coun­t)

Many pro­grams re­quire pass­words from the us­er.

It's nice when a pro­gram can re­mem­ber the pass­word you give it.

It's nicer when it stores said pass­word safe­ly. How­ev­er, it's not triv­ial to do that if you care for cross-­plat­form sup­port.

Or at least it was­n't un­til Kang Zhang wrote python keyring, a mod­ule that ab­stracts the pass­word stor­age mech­a­nisms for KDE, GNOME, OSX and win­dows (and adds a cou­ple of file-based back­ends just in case).

So, how does it work?

In­stall it in the usu­al way. If it's not pack­aged for your dis­tro/­op­er­at­ing sys­tem, just use easy_in­stal­l:

easy_install keyring

You could al­so get it from mer­cu­ri­al:

hg clone http://bitbucket.org/kang/python-keyring-lib/

The API is sim­plic­i­ty it­self. This is how you save a se­cret:

import keyring
keyring.set_password('keyring_demo','username','thisisabadpassword')

You may get this di­a­log (or some ana­log on oth­er plat­form­s):

And here's the proof that it was saved cor­rect­ly (this is KDE's pass­word man­ager):

And how do you get the se­cret back?

import keyring
print keyring.get_password('keyring_demo','username')

This is how it run­s:

$ python load.py
thisisabadpassword

As you can see, the API is as easy as it could pos­si­ble get. It even chose the KWal­let back­end au­to­mat­i­cal­ly be­cause I am in KDE!

Python-keyring is a mod­ule that fix­es a big prob­lem, so a big thank you to Kang Zhang and Tarek Zi­adé (who had the idea)