Re: Preference reduction

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

2009/1/4 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.

These changes are now all in SVN... now for some of the harder stuff.

> 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.

This sounds possible, though obviously something like tab size would
have to be a 2/4/8 sort of choice.

On the other hand, between the possibility of file-type specific
settings (and maybe some vim/emacs modeline parsing magic) I think it
would be fairly easy to make switching these options a very rare task.
This would obviously be a fair bit more work though.

> 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.

Right. What did you have in mind? should the default filters simply
not be deleteable or modifiable? I can't think of any other way to
make updating these not a risky option.

I think this is certainly possible, though there would probably have
to be some kind of one-time migration to avoid losing people's filter
on upgrading to meld+1.

> 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.

I've had exactly the same thought, and also failed to come up with a
good UI. Most IDEs simply go with a drop down of supported mime types
and configuration options for each of those. It's very ugly, but just
serviceable if you don't expose too many options per mime type. I'll
see if I can come up with anything; I'd love to stop having to change
these settings when I swap between C and python.

--
Kai