Hello:

I want to get your thoughts on a possible change to the Code Snippet part.

I dug through the source code and found where the snippets are actually stored 
on disk, in an *.rc file.  What I'm picturing here is a directory somewhere 
containing sub-directories (the groups) and text files (the actual code 
snippet, one text file per snippet).

A routine within the Snippet part would examine this directory (configured 
perhaps within KDevelops settings dialog) and create the tree-like view (a 
KListView widget, right?) structured to match the directory hierarchy and use 
the text file's file name perhaps as the Text to display for each snippet in 
the tree-view.

In my mind, storing the snippets in a directory as regular text files would 
enable several things:

1.  It gets closer to the unix philosophy that everything is a text file (well 
even the rc file is a text file, but in this form is is not so tightly 
structured)

2.  Having a single file contain a single snippet would allow users to create 
snippets using their favorite editor, vi, emacs, etc. just as they would 
create any other text file (they would not have to worry about the structure 
of an rc file)

3.  Folks could use sed, awk, perl, etc. to manipulate and modify code 
snippets with more ease than if they were bound to an rc file structure.

4.  Given this is a simple directory, development teams could I think more 
easily publish a standard set of templates in a location accessible to all 
developers and that way all running instances of KDevelop (for each 
developer) could read that single location for the code snippets.  As far as 
I know right now you could not do this with an rc file--you would have to 
give a copy to each developer after you added all the standard snippets, at 
least I think so.

5.  Doing so would just seem to open up the snippets to better use with other 
standard Unix tools, as described above.

6.  Of course, with the idea of publishing a single directory for your 
snippets, maybe we should think about a primary (or central) snippets path 
and a local snippets path, both configurable within KDevelop's settings 
dialog (or the conf dialog for the snippets part) and the snippets tree-view 
could reflect a main tree-node for the central location and a main node for 
the local location (the individual developer's own personal snippets 
collection).  Maybe some sort of "sharing" feature could be added to allow a 
developer to publish a snippet from his local collection to the central 
snippet location?  This seems like it would be a simple cp 
mysnippet  /path/to/central/snippet/location operation.

Well, this is just an idea I had as I was looking at the current snippet part.  
I think this would be an easy enough enhancement for someone at my level of 
knowledge of C++ could handle, unless you all disagree.

Does anyone agree with the idea, or does anyone disagree with the idea?  Does 
anyone have any thoughts, concerns, questions, or comments about the idea?

I think this would give me that great opportunity to finally contribute some 
code to an open source project.

Thanks,

-Jason

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