Re: spacial

[Daniel Borgmann <spark-mailinglists web de>]

On Thu, 2004-04-29 at 23:53, Jerry Haltom wrote:
> > That doesn't make much sense, though.  It's quite useful to have two
> > copies of the same file open, perhaps with different edits, to be saved
> > to different locations or used as temporaries.
> 
> The tabs defiantly need an option to go. *I* would much rather have each
> text file opened in a separate app, but I realize a lot of people like
> tabs, so the option should be there.

FWIW, I absolutely second that. I want to use a spatial text editor, MDI
interfaces make me want to scream. So badly that I wrote my own
semi-spatial text editor with Mono which does the job for me, but I
don't think it's good enough to release it yet (it's also missing the
critical functionality of making sure that a document is only open
once). It would be great to have a simple spatial text editor by
default...

Hopefully more applications will follow. I also think that the desktop
should offer good support for those kind of applications. One thing
would be to have a common way to store document metadata, so Nautilus
can update it when a file moves, etc. Another important thing would be
an easy and standardised way to create empty documents of a certain type
from within the desktop, because 'File -> New' and 'File -> Save As'
aren't that great from an object oriented point of view. Currently you
have to know the file ending to do this (not a problem for me, but not
very usable) and in the version of Nautilus I'm using, it even complains
about the file ending not matching the detected type ("Unknown")...

As for the usefulness of having the same file opened twice... I can only
see this being useful for different views on the same object, for
example to reference one part of the document while working on another
or to work on different parts of the document without constantly
scrolling up and down. A compromise might involve spawning of new views,
which would then be updated in sync and also be saved as a "state" of
the document. Coming up with good UI for this sounds interesting to me.
For everything else, it would be a lot more straight forward to simply
copy the document with Nautilus.