For the past few months I have been working on a simple windows notepad like text editor. It’s nothing special, but when I first switched to linux I looked around and it took me a while to find leafpad. Unlike leafpad however, Janus uses gtk3, a much more modern toolkit then gtk2, it can display and modify binary data, and it can highlight code syntax for most popular languages. Feel free to check it out on the github.
The main thing is that gtk3 is a little more stable and available for now. Gtk deprecates tons of functions seemingly at random, and I don’t want to have to constantly re-code my project as they deprecate things. As for availability, Gtk3 is shipped everywhere as 3.24 rather than different distros having different versions, gtksourceview4 is shipped on older distributions then gtksourceview5 (meaning more compatibility), and if I ever wanted to port to other operating systems Gtk4 would be much harder than 3. Finally, before the starting Janus I was under the impression that no gtk4 apps could be themed, but I have since learned that that is not the case. Knowing what I do now, once they iron out more of the kinks I will definitely port to gtk4, but first I want to make sure everything works well.
As for binary editing, I took a very different approach to other editors. Most either convert the binary data to a code page (very confusing and nearly impossible to edit) or use escape characters, which is not a bad solution by any means but looks increasingly worse with the entropy of the data. I eventually came up with this approach, which I think maintains the simplicity of a notepad editor while allowing the functionality I meant to include.
Very interesting, thanks for the anwer!