Looking for issues to contribute

[miro-penchev]

Hi all, I am looking around the project and trying to find good issue to contribute some dev efforts to the project.
What do you think about this one:
“Make Find in Files multi threaded” #11706 from GitHub issues tracker, sorry but as new user I cant post links.

Personally I’ve run in that limitation many times when I am using Notepad++ for grep search in a big tree with a lot of files.

Or any other suggestions for a good issue for contributing source code.

[Alan Kilborn]

@miro-penchev said in Looking for issues to contribute:

“Make Find in Files multi threaded” #11706 from GitHub issues tracker,

If I were you, I wouldn’t attempt that as a first thing as a new contributor.
Tackle something easier first.
Advice: Find an issue that is an obvious bug, and fix that. Less controversy, less opportunity for N++ author to deny your work.
But…your decision.

[miro-penchev]

@Alan-Kilborn yes, you are right and I tried to find something more easier and shorter as expected work, not because of my dev experience, but because I am actually a newbie in that particular project. I browse for few hours the issues tracker, but it’s full with opened issues many of them are not actually ‘open’ for some work. I’ve seen many issues actually resolved in comments, many from you btw :) but issues still ‘open’. So, maybe I will try some more time to find something smaller as work.

[Alan Kilborn]

@miro-penchev

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many issues actually resolved in comments…but issues still ‘open’.

Often times I present workarounds (or scripts) that truly don’t make an issue’s petitioner happy, so they leave the issue open.

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but it’s full with opened issues many of them are not actually ‘open’ for some work

Confused a bit by this…
If an issue is “open”, a reasonable assumption is that it is available for work…
But, there is no guarantee that the author of N++ has seen that issue, and is agreeable that work done on it would be accepted – in this case it is fine to “ping” the author and ask if it is okay to work on the issue (that’s still no guarantee that work will be accepted, but it is a big step towards that).

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I will try some more time to find something smaller as work

I could have a look and suggest some, but it would truly be better if you locate your own, as I don’t know where your interests lie.
(As a first thought, there are some (created by me and others) relating to Shortcut Mapper problems and inconsistencies…maybe you have interest in those?)

[Mark Olson]

@miro-penchev
If you wanted to work on an issue that would help you better understand the find/replace form, I’d suggest working on a bug that I looked at a while back but gave up on, namely the fact that the Count feature of the find/replace form does not count empty matches.

If you choose to work on that issue, I suspect you will find that there is far too much global state being passed around by the find/replace form for a multi-threaded approach to be particularly tractable.

[miro-penchev]

@Mark-Olson Thanks Mark, probably I will take a look at that bug - sounds interesting to me. Meanwhile as @Alan-Kilborn suggested I take a look on shortcuts issues and found good ones for first try, as this one for example:
https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issues/11975

[Alan Kilborn]

@miro-penchev

IMO 11975 isn’t a good one to work on, due to its low probability of acceptance.

To me, the author of that issue kills it when he leads off by saying “Although I understand that the majority of people do not use the F13 to F24 keys, as they are not on physical keyboards…”

The author of Notepad++ wants to accept changes to benefit large numbers of users. Changes that only help a few (or maybe even one!) user add more risk of bug introduction than potential benefit.

Although…there is some attractiveness to the other part of that issue (which really should have been made a separate issue as it is distinctively different – the part about simply pressing the keycombo you want to assign to a function.

Regarding “shortcut” issues that I’d recommend to work on (if these types of issues suit you), are THESE .

[Alan Kilborn]

@Mark-Olson said in Looking for issues to contribute:

a bug … that the Count feature of the find/replace form does not count empty matches.

Here’s the official bug report on that: https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issues/13608

[Coises]

@Mark-Olson said in Looking for issues to contribute:

a bug that I looked at a while back but gave up on, namely the fact that the Count feature of the find/replace form does not count empty matches.

For whatever it’s worth, based on these comments :

// Allow empty matches, but not immediately after previous match for replace all or find all.
// Other search types should ignore empty matches completely.

in the ProcessRange routine (called by ProcessAll which is called when processing IDCCOUNTALL ) it appears to be a design choice, not a bug.

[miro-penchev]

@Alan-Kilborn well, actually the second part I liked in that issue - about edit control where user can just press the shortcut they want, as I’ve seen that in many other programs, instead of selecting it from a long drop down. The F13-F24 actually not much to “fix” its just one array in the source code. Probably I will make a new issue with second part.

[Lycan Thrope]

@miro-penchev ,
Sadly, @Alan-Kilborn is right, as I have on my older desktop computers the old keyboards with 124 keys, and always appreciated the extra spots for putting my own macros etc, so this would be a feature that interested me, but as @Alan-Kilborn points out, this is a niche use case, and finding a desirable number of people to test it, let alone NEED it, isn’t a compelling issue, since most people using those kinds of keyboard may very well be able to write their own macros for those keys to do what they want. I don’t have access to them right now to test that theory, but the argument still holds, that it’s not a common enough keyboard to warrant an application wide need to change it.