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I am also considering trying out: wxWindows, fltk.
Any respectable editor has a terminal frontend. This is also true for AEditor.
Ncurses is unfortunatly not able to tell the state of the modifier keys. As far as I know only XTerm supplies the modifier state, when you press a key. Because of these restrictions the keybinding facilities are very limited. I am thinking about creating a VI interface for the Ncurses frontend, in order to adress these issues.
investigate unicode support in Ncurses.
investigate define_key.
Fox works on many platforms and it works well with Ruby. Unfortunatly Fox does not support unicode and the documentation is poor. Besides that its very nice to do programming with. Fox is C++ code and has a ok notification mechanism. The compilation of you own Fox code is fast (Fox is doing much better than QT). The best reference to Fox is its source code (easy to understand). The visual look'n'feel could be better. Besides all these things I consider Fox to be the way to go for AEditor. Fox wins over QT because of license issues and faster compilation. Fox wins over GTK because of a better API and more OOP spirit.
I have made some experiments with writing my own custom AEditor widget in C++. I also made some semi-successful attempts to glue it together with Ruby.
The first GUI I started trying out were GTK--™ becasue its C++ and there would be a chance that I could get away easily (work smarter not harder). Unfortunatly it behaves strange (GTK'ish), when something isn't working I had to dvelve into the C documentation and try to figure out why it wasn't working. I gave up after have spend a week on it without any progress. GTK has unicode, themable, is only a GUI (not the entire operating system). I don't love GTK, but I am really interested in making a working AEditor widget for it.
I made an experimental AEditor widget, but very far from functional. Perhaps I should write the widget directly for GTK in order to get more success? Do you have any experience writing custom-widgets using GTK ?
Bad news first: License sucks, The moc precompiler makes compilation way too timeconsuming, QT is not just a window toolkit (its a whole api for everything). Besides these really bad things I like the look'n'feel which can be customized a lot. QT has support for unicode. Also QT is C++. Because of the licensing issues I don't feel good about QT. Because of the other bad things makes me try to avoid it.
I have made an experimental AEditor widget for QT, but I have stopped working on it because of too slow compilation issues (it takes 3 minutes to compile 2 c++ files on my pentium350, way too much for my taste).
Todays editors loon'n'feel is terrible. Syntax hiliting is messy and there is no nice visual effects which use your expensive Radeon graphics card. Normal people which don't do programming doesn't find programmers-editors attractive. I have tried teach my brother how to do programming, but he rather wants to play silly games which look nice.
I want to create an application which is visual appealing, which has the abilities to attract new people to programming. Much visual bloating, One big show off. NO!
Seriously I think using OpenGL can help pair-programming, by making nice realtime animations of otherwise disturbing operations. For instance, the visual disturbance of PageDown could be reduced by animating the operation over a few consequtive frames, maybe 5 frames is enough. This is my primary goal with OpenGL.