A couple of months ago, I got word of a project that an acquaintance of mine as working on. Information given to me was very vague at the time because the technical details of the project were still under wraps until there was something substantial worthy of being released. The project under heavy development did not even have a name. The only real accurate details I had were that it would share a close relationship with ElementaryOS. (While you’re at it, check out our recent review of the ElementaryOS Betas here).
Well, those couple of months have passed and we now not only have some more details of the project at hand, but also some working code to demonstrate the software’s primary functions. It’s worth noting that the current code is considered Alpha 1 and there is not a lot of the intended features added or working yet. And it’s really just a preview of what is to come. Based on what I have seen and used so far, I’m really excited and it’s a project that I am following pretty darn closely. And thankfully, I’m in a position to be getting first hand information on the latest developments. So I’ll be sure to cover the latest news and developments as it happens. If you want to follow the development progress yourself, the source code has been made available at Github here.
So what is this mysterious project that I am referring to? The software application name is called Baseline and is part of the eStudio package. You can download the Alpha 1 package from here. There are packages available for both i386 and amd64. But as I mentioned, it is currently a preview of what is to come. Even in this very early stage of development, what is there and functioning is functioning well and as intended.
What is Baseline?
Baseline is a code editor with a strong focus toward vala and web development. Albeit, I have been informed that there is syntax support being built in for many other popular programming languages. There is also heavy development being done to include a compiler. In a nutshell, when Baseline is complete, it will be a powerful code editor and development environment for programmers and software and web developers.
The layout of the GUI is clean and simple. It’s very easy on the eye and the placing of the buttons and menus ties in well with the ElementaryOS theme. As you see in the screenshot, I am running it on ElementaryOS Beta 2 (Luna), which is my primary operating system.
You have the left pane which displays your current project and its files that you are currently working on and the files contents open in the main screen section. It’s a sleek and simple look and functional as it proves in use.
Based on the very early code that I have used, Baseline is looking very promising. It’s a nice addition for any developer system sitting next to Emacs, Geany and the many other tools that you probably already have installed. For my own personal projects, I am already using it for the features that are already included. But the more code that gets added and released, it will evolve in to something even more special than what it is already. Watch this space.
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