Re: [Nautilus-list] Status...

["John Sullivan" <sullivan eazel com>]

on 11/7/00 8:51 AM, Calum Benson at calum benson sun com wrote:

> John Sullivan wrote:
> 
>>> Yes, come to think of it, I'd never actually tried to Undo a permanent
>>> delete on Windows, for example... and you can't, which sort of makes
>>> sense.  The trashcan *is* the Undo feature for deletes... which you
>>> could argue is sort of confusing in itself-- why should Undo-ing a
>>> delete be any different from undoing anything else?  But we can debate
>>> that one some other time :o)
>> 
>> There is a very good reason for this, actually. Undo is linear -- that is,
>> you can only undo actions in the reverse order that they were performed.
> 
> Well, that's the convention these days, certainly... but it's not
> necessarily always very useful.  It's admittedly hard to do it any other
> way *if* you've subsequently changed the object to which a particular
> action in the undo list applies-- but quite often you haven't.
> 
> For example, in a word processing app, if I format a paragraph a
> particular way, go away and edit some other part of the document, then
> decide I want that paragraph back the way it was, there's no reason on
> earth why I should be forced to undo everything I've done since... and
> there's many a time I've cursed an application for forcing me to do just
> that!
> 
> Wouldn't it be wonderful if an action in the undo list remained
> independently reversible throughout its "undoable" lifespan (i.e. in the
> simplest case, until you subsequently changed the object to which it
> applied)?  Sure it's a non-trivial problem, but that's what we're here
> for  :o)

Okay, that's an interesting area for discussion, but it is sort of twisting
the subject away from your original question about "why not just use Undo
for delete instead of the Trash?".

Have you seen the Photoshop "History" feature? It, combined with the
"History Brush" tool, is very much along the lines of your suggestion. It is
a pretty advanced feature though -- probably the biggest challenge in any
such design is making it comprehensible to non-super-experts.

John