Re: Preference reduction

["Stephen Kennedy" <stevek gnome org>]

On Thu, Jan 1, 2009 at 11:50 AM, Kai Willadsen <kai willadsen gmail com> wrote:
> 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

Hi Kai, I'm in favour of all the above.

> Editor
> =====

It might be nice to duplicate some of the most commonly changed options
in the menu (tab-size, tab-inserts-space, etc). They were originally relegated
to the preferences dialog because there was no sane way to handle this
before the gtkuimanager patch.

> 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.

Agreed they're important enough to get their own entry. One other
thing to be fixed is that the default and user defined filters should
be stored separately so that new filters show up without having to
hit "revert" and lose local changes.


Related to both editor and filter preferences further in the future is
the fact that one will usually want filters & settings to be enabled
based on the file type. That will make things much more complex
however and I have yet to see a good UI for this feature - suggestions
welcome here.

Regards,
Stephen.