Preference reduction

["Kai Willadsen" <kai willadsen gmail com>]

Hi all,

This is a somewhat long proposal on some simplification (well,
removal) of Meld's preferences. The short version of the proposal is:
 * remove drawing style preference, default to curved
 * remove toolbar appearance preference, default to gnome default if
it exists or text-under-icons otherwise
 * remove save-as-utf8 encoding preference, default to always retain
current encoding
 * move now-smaller preference dialogue to a normal tabbed dialogue

If these are considered acceptable changes, I'll happily do the work
on this. (In fact, since I started writing this email, I've done
almost all of the required work for this...)


Here is the long version...


Meld's preference dialogue is pretty good, but there could be less of
it. I've had a look through Meld's preferences and have come up with a
few possible changes. If you think I've missed something obvious, or
that your use case isn't represented, or that I'm just plain wrong,
please yell. List of preference tabs follows.


Editor
=====

These preferences should probably all stay. They could be reformatted
a little to be prettier, probably cribbing heavily from gedit for some
of the possible layout options (see for example gedit's word-wrapping
option presentation).


File Filters and Text Filters
=====

These are obviously useful and need to stay, but I believe that
they're not 'preferences'. Filters probably deserve their own menu
entry, and there is a whole lot of functionality that they *could*
cover, but don't currently. However, that's a story for another day.


Display
=====

Drawing Style
...determines how the central bar is drawn. However, the 'Simple'
setting is quite ugly and doesn't really help Meld's visualisation at
all, and the 'Solid' style has been completely broken for several
releases without anyone complaining. The only downside to the default
'Curved' style is that it's theoretically more CPU-intensive... but
drawing time is unlikely to show up on any realistic profile, so this
would seem to be a purely theoretical downside.
I propose that this preference be removed, with the 'Curved' drawing
style being retained as the only supported option.

Toolbar Appearance
...used to be a common setting in gnome/gtk apps, but a quick check of
fifteen or so of my installed apps suggest that this preference has
all but died out (only pidgin and epiphany still had it, and epiphany
only through its toolbar editor).
I propose that this preference be removed, and the Gnome default used
where available, with the gtk default of text-under-icons being used
otherwise.


Encoding
=====

Loading
...determines what encodings are tried to get a sensible text file. I
wish there was a way to get rid of this, but I can't find a good
option, as auto-detecting text encodings is notoriously unreliable.
Gedit uses a metadata approach to make sure that you only have to
select a file's encoding once, but this seems like overkill for Meld.
Suggestions welcome.

Saving
...determines what text encoding is used to save a file. Saving in the
file's current encoding seems like the only sensible option, as
changing a file encoding without asking is just rude. Also, this would
mean that we get to remove some ticky-boxes.
I propose that this preference be removed, with the only supported
option being the current behaviour of 'Save in the file's original
encoding'.


With some of these changes and a little rearrangement, the preferences
dialogue could easily be down to three or four tabs -- two if filters
are moved to their own dialogue -- and could easily revert to being a
normal tabbed preference pane.

cheers,
Kai