Re: "Undo" button in capplets

[Denis Washington <dwashington gmx net>]

Calum Benson wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-04-07 at 13:21 +0200, Denis Washington wrote:
>   
> > Hello,
> >
> > I have noticed that some capplets have "Revert" or "Reset to Defaults" 
> > buttons for certain settings. How about building a more general way of 
> > this functionality into all capplets? My idea would be to add an "Undo" 
> > button next to the "Close" button of each capplet (or "Finish", but 
> > that's another debate... ;). This button would then revert the last 
> > single change a user made. That way, the user could undo a few changes 
> > without automatically losing all changes he or she made since starting 
> > the capplet. The undo history would best start with the start of the 
> > capplet, so undoing as much as possible would be the same as "Revert".
> >
> > Comments?
> >     
>
> We've been over this a few times before; trouble is we can never agree
> what to do :/
>
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=95110
>
> Cheeri,
> Calum.
>
>   

My two cents on this:

"Revert": As soon you made only one change that you like to keep, this 
is pretty much useless.

"Reset to Defaults": How should a user remember which are the defaults? 
How would the defaults really help the user, given that they are really 
very few settings that can seriously "break" anything? What if I use the 
feature and realize that I like the defaults less than the settings before?

"Undo" is a common thing in most applications, and it Just Works. I 
don't know why we should further complicate the task of taking back 
changes. I mean, it's still just a pretty small part of the things you 
do inside a preferences dialog, why have two or even three buttons with 
slightly diefferent semantics for it?