I have been think­ing on what I re­al­ly re­al­ly want in a word pro­ces­sor. And then what would it take to cre­ate such a thing.

A few min­utes of play­ing have led me the way of this teas­er (video here if you can't see it):

Could some­thing come out of it? Who knows.

Writ­ing an ed­i­tor is rein­vent­ing the wheel. I know that. I tell my­self Mar­ave is a fine wheel, with dis­tinct fea­tures, and I think that is true, but, if you are rein­vent­ing the wheel, there's no need to rein­vent the axle and the spoke, too.

So, I refac­tored the stuff that I think a text ed­i­tor must pro­vide in­to a nice li­brary, so the next time some­one must in­vent a wheel, he can use Mar­ave's neat spokes and axles:

So, in­tro­duc­ing Ed­i­tor, the most-ob­vi­ous­ly named class ev­er! It's a text edit­ing wid­get for PyQt with ex­tra fea­tures, which you can use as a drop-in re­place­ment for a QTextE­d­it or QPlain­TextE­d­it.

Right now, it lives in­side Mar­ave's SVN but it may even move out some­day.

Here are its fea­tures:

• Syn­­tax high­­­light­ing

  And I don't mean "in the­o­ry", like QTex­tE­d­it and com­­pa­ny do! Ed­i­­tor can high­­­light a bunch of lan­guages, be­­cause it us­es GNU source high­­­light via Loren­­zo Bet­­tini's Source High­­­light Qt.

• Spell check­­ing

  If you have PyEn­chant in­­stalled and the right dic­­tio­­nar­ies, it will do on­­line spellcheck­­ing.

• Search and Search+Re­­place wid­gets

  The Ed­i­­tor class can give you nice wid­gets for search or search and re­­place al­ready hooked with the ed­i­­tor wid­get, so you can add them to your ap­p's UI eas­i­­ly.

• new/open/save/saveas meth­od­s:

  Don't im­­ple­­ment open­ing/sav­ing, etc your­­self! That's al­ways the same code!

Hope­ful­ly this will be help­ful for some­one else :-)

The nice fel­lows at Packt Pub­lish­ing have sent me a copy of Grok 1.0 Web De­vel­op­ment by Car­los de la Guardia to re­view.

I am read­ing it and ex­pect to write about it in a few days (BTW: nice so far! My pro­posed slo­gan: it's like zope, with­out the Ja­va [1]), and here is a sam­ple chap­ter so you can see what it's about. It's easy to read stan­dalone, too:

Chap­ter 5: Forms

Hav­ing had to deal this week with the bro­ken­ness that's Djan­go old­forms (le­ga­cy site, don't even ask), the Grok way of deal­ing with forms is re­fresh­ing ;-)

[1] Yes, of course I know Zope had no Ja­va in it, it just felt like Ja­va ;-)

Here's what Ohloh has to say about the cost of de­vel­op­ing Mar­ave

Re­al­ly, Mar­ave is maybe a month of part-­time pro­gram­ming. How could that pos­si­ble be U$S71355, or "1 Per­son Years"?

Is this garbage the best we have to es­ti­mate cost­s? If that's the case, then when­ev­er you see some­thing about "Open source pro­gram X would take Y years and cost Z dol­lars to write", cut it down by a fac­tor of 10 or more.

Here's what Mar­ave re­al­ly cost­ed to de­vel­op:

• Noth­ing.

Ok, here's what it would have cost­ed if I had charged for it:

I am guess­ing about 100 hours of my time. At my "I hope they pay me this much" rate of U$S 40/hour , that's U$S 4000, which means Ohloh is off by 1600%.

OTO­H, for that much free­lance work I would not charge you the full rate, I would prob­a­bly end charg­ing you more like U$S20/hour which would make Ohlo­h's guess over 3000% too high.

In con­clu­sion: if you like my code (and hey, you can see it for your­self), hire me, I am in­cred­i­bly cheap, or amaz­ing­ly fast!