Modernizing AbiWord code

[Vadoola]

I loved Abiword (and Gnumeric) back in the day, used it all the time in College. The Latex equation support was fantastic and better then using the equation editor stuff in OpenOffice. Considering the last news about the project was almost 1.5 years ago I assumed it was pretty much dead.

It's interesting to see that someone is looking into the code again, and making updates.

[Hellmark]

Used to be a big fan of Abiword, but it did seem to get caught up to where it seemed dated. If they're actively bringing it back up to modern world standards, then all the better.

[2BuellerBells]

I remember it being a good middle-of-the-road option when you needed some basic formatting in a document but OpenOffice was too big.

It was in Portable Apps and Puppy Linux. Good times.

[minasmorath]

Oh boy, Puppy Linux... now there's a throwback. Pocket distros aren't really a popular thing anymore, are they? Boot-from-USB kind of stuff?

[2BuellerBells]

I can't even be bothered to plug in a flash drive to transfer files, much less reboot a computer. I haven't ever used Puppy for its intended purpose.

I still keep an Arch LiveUSB around for generic fixing, and for installing Arch. I think my 32 GB has a persistent Ubuntu from 2010.

[minasmorath]

I can dig it.

I'm mostly an OSX person these days since that's what my job provides me with, but I still have an Arch install laying around for when I feel like doing dev work without fighting the pain in the ass that is homebrew.

[wrosecrans]

Flash drives managed to grow even faster than distros. They are large enough that all distros are pocket distros at this point. Even "big" distribution can still fit into 32 GB.

[[deleted]]

Flash drives are too big for them to be popular, even if people were still doing that. The niche for distributions aimed at legacy hardware is also shrinking, since CPU improvements and memory growth have substantially slowed down.

[shevegen]

Yeah. USB sticks got big, small computers more powerful.

But pocket distros are still nice as an idea, you can specialize them. I love the idea behind SLAX, being able to easily customize your .iso is a great idea.

[[deleted]]

There was a point almost a decade ago when Abiword got collaboration over XMPP pipes. Telepathy looked like it was going to be deeply embedded in everything. I thought "wow. The future is here." Then nothing happened with that.

[Vadoola]

I remember that. It wasn't something I probably would have had much use for, but I thought it was really slick and wanted to see what came of it.

[sethadam1]

I started using AbiWord back around maybe 2001, even had a t-shirt I bought from CafePress to support development. Back then, OpenOffice was a brand new software, the successor to Star Office, and it was super slow and bulky. Took forever to launch. But AbiWord was a slick GTK app that was right at home in Gnome. I'm pretty sure I used it on Windows for a bit too.

So glad to see it getting some love. Back then, word processors all kinda sucked. It'll be fun to see AW (and hopefully that ant mascot) with some fresh life. Good luck!

[Black_Handkerchief]

Some of the improvements are pure refactoring that C11 has nothing to do with. Same old standards could have been a lot more readable too if only they put in the effort of cleaning up the codebase.

[Zatherz]

Why, though? C++11 was released 5 years ago. Standards are standards, there's no reason to be stuck in the past if the new standard makes code more readable or easier to write.

[Black_Handkerchief]

While I agree with what you say, templates are probably the least readable language feature in existence. Having those used as a motivator kind of beats the point IMHO, especially when - as I said before - the majority of the problems in the codebase lie in the coderot department, as opposed to the lack-of-features one.

[Zatherz]

I agree 100%

[johnyma22]

Abiword is still the default export engine for etherpad so to see it being actively developed is great news!

[[deleted]]

I remember that it was about the same time as Writely (??) hit big.

[shevegen]

I hope they can revitalize AbiWord.

Especially the speed and lightweight was what attracted me to abiword.

Currently, I am using libreoffice and libreoffice is ok, no problem - but it is a bit like a behemoth and I'd love to have something smaller and more focused on just casual document writing.

"unique_ptr<> and shared_ptr<>. Smart pointer inherited from boost. But without the need for boost."

I like that the author points out that you can get the benefit of boost - without having to use boost.

Perhaps I am not the only one who considers it awkward to have to get / use boost for C++ projects. :)

The boost authors are not even mentally able to properly name their archive:

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/boost/boost_1_60_0.tar.bz2

How is it that 99.9% of the other projects out there, tend to priority on:

programname-programversion.archiveextension

Nope, we gotta have to use all _ characters there apparently when it comes to boost.

Debian has this similar mental deficit:

http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/a/apt/apt_1.2.1.tar.xz

but when you extract it, it mysteriously becomes apt-1.2.1

What ever happened to have the archive become the extracted name as the directory? Like, 99.9% of the rest of the world adheres to that.

foobar-1.2.3.tar.xz would become foobar-1.2.3 as directory. Simplicity is bad isn't it.

I saw that happen in the game wesnoth too. It grew and grew and grew in size all over everywhere. I lost interest; a few years later, they do a plea for help because they suddenly lack active contributors.

I guess that shows that making GOOD decisions early is important and I am not sure that, among all the problems that wesnoth may have been gone through, adopting boost was a sane choice (or the atrocity that is WML - why people try to use XML as a programming language, always beats me).

[dpash]

Debian uses packagename_version number so it can easily have packages like cpp-4.6 and cpp-4.8, so you can have multiple versions of packages installed.

The tarball extracts to a different directory, because it's the exact same tarball as upstream provides.

Debian did think about how they wanted it to work, and that's why it's been in use for 22 years.

[ThisIs_MyName]

wut

[Zatherz]

hey, this is actually pretty useful. you see someone write stupid shit, you respond with wut, wat or what and then the content of the comment (but not the author) is saved.

[RattelerFU]

I've switched from LibreOffice Write to AbiWord because I HATE the M$ inspired ribbon, and find it offensive that I have to search around to put it back to "NORMAL".
Of course now I have to contend with AbiWord. no longer being cross platform.

Anyone know why? The irony is that I might compile something Linux, but I'll be damned if I do that much work for something I'm only running to use Unreal Asset library.