Even though there's still 2 days to go until Padre's 1st Birthday Party Hackathon is due to begin, there's already something of a party atmosphere and the commit rate in the last week has skyrocketed.
In particular, Gabriel Vieria (who has only been contributing for a couple of weeks) has decided to take the directory browser as his own personal fiefdom.
Half a week and 1500 lines of code later, he's turned it into what Swarm hacker Andrew Bramble appropriately describes as "Double plus awesome fwoar!".
Not only is it orders of magnitude faster, he's added icons, allowed the expansion state to be cached and restored across changes in project context, and managed to clone Komodo's recursive nested filter search in a single night.
Shiny fresh screenshot here!
As with many previous new contributors, not only does the additional effort accelerate the rate of change generally, but his concentrated effort in one specific area drivers development in other areas. In this case, the awesome directory/project browser should drive improvements in Padre's "Implied Project" support, in particular adding things like zero-configuration detection of hidden directories that can be culled out of the directory tree.
With the wallclock time for the last 50 commits down to only 5 hours, it's looking like it will be an awesome weekend hackathon.
If you'd like to join us, you'll find us in #padre on irc.perl.org.
I had intended to get Padre installed (from source) for the first time during the party, but that didn't happen.
It would've been feasible had I not needed to take time out to be sick, but... when y'all say there's a lot of dependencies, y'all aren't kidding. It might have taken about 11 hours of computer time, 4 hours of my time. Note this includes getting the Apple Developer tools, attempting install, and then getting the right version of the Apple Developer tools for my system.
But, while there's clearly still work to be done, it looks fairly impressive thus far. I am enthusiastic about putting in some work on this.
