textview

[Mark Nelson <nels1678 tc umn edu>]

Hi Guys,

I recently reinstalled linux/gnome2 a little while ago as I upgraded my
primary harddrive.  This gave me a nice opportunity to see what default
settings I ended up changing, and what settings I ended up keeping. 
There were a couple of settings in nautilus that I changed, but that
were mostly things like removing the location and sidebar.  One of them
though kind of stood out though.  That is the textview as being a
default setting for viewing text files.  

I'm not a novice user, so I knew what was happening when the textvew for
a given text file was opened when double clicking on that file.  I also
know how to change that behavior so that gedit opens instead.  If I had
not known that it was loading the text in a view instead of an editor,
and had I not known how to change this so that text files load in gedit,
I believe I would have been rather confused/upset.  

This seems to be reiterated in the usability study that sun did for
gnome 1.2.  In the "Nautilus Viewer Mode" section, a lot of new users
expressed confusion as to what was happening when nautilus opened text
files in the viewer mode.  I can't say I blame them.  If we are making
gnome with the intent that it should be easy for new users to use,
textview really seems like it needs to go.

Thanks,
Mark