Title: "GtkSourceView: a future full of colors" Authors: Gustavo Giráldez Paolo Maggi (Politecnico di Torino) Abstract: GtkSourceView is a text widget that extends the standard gtk+ 2.x text widget by implementing syntax highlighting and other features typical of a source editor. It is part of the GNOME Desktop Environment and it is currently being used by gedit, MonoDevelop, Scaffold and several other projects. Although it has proved to be a quite good solution, it still has a long way to go to compete with other analogous projects like Scintilla or the widget used by Kate and KDevelop. Current version of GtkSourceView was designed to be easy to use by a generic text editor like gedit, but it is not powerful enough to satisfy the requirements of more developer oriented applications like Scaffold and MonoDevelop. In particular it lacks many important source editor features, and its syntax highlight algorithm has various shortcomings that show up when used with a limited but important set of languages like, for example, HTML and XML. The new version of GtkSourceView, we are working on, has been completely refactored. It will include a syntax highlight engine based on a new algorithm that works using language specific finite state machines which can be easily described using simple XML files. It will also include important editing features, that has been requested by several users, like call tips, auto-completion, per-language customizable smart indentation and, provided we can get invisible text support in GtkTextView, code folding. In this paper we will first describe the current version of GtkSourceView and its main limitations. Then we will present the design and the implementation of the new highlight engine and of the new features we are going to include in the new version. Finally we will give a short overview on the available language bindings.