Re: [Usability]gedit line wrapping and keyboard navigation

[Per Cederberg <per percederberg net>]

Joshua Adam Ginsberg wrote:
> Re: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107904
>
> In gedit, the option to have line wrapping brings up an interesting
> usability question. I wanted to try to get the list's comments.
>
> The basic question is in such an application, should keyboard navigation
> follow logical lines or visible lines? That is, say I've got a line that
> is longer than the visible line length and so it wraps to the next line.
> Line numbering in gEdit described logical lines, not visible lines, thus
> line numbers skip over numbering the wrapped portion of my line. But
> keyboard navigation follows visible lines, thus if I am at the first
> character of line #45 and line #45 is wrapped, hitting the down arrow
> takes me one visible line down, but I'm still on the logical line #45.
>
> In the bug I brought up an example where the following of visible lines
> is particularly annoying. Say I'm editing code and I have to change the
> number of tab indents of a series of lines. I'm used to having a
> repeated use of "down, left, tab" to insert an additional indent.
> However with the down key following visible lines and not logical lines,
> I have to consider whether hitting the down key has taken me to a new
> logical line or kept me on the same one.
>
> Anyways, comments? Thoughts?

Well, personally I think the gEdit behaviour is better in most cases
(although not in this case). It is extremely annoying to open a file
without linebreaks and not being able to navigate it at all (except
by left and right arrow). For some reason this keeps happening to me
in Emacs all the time... (I know, shouldn't admit to using Emacs
here... ;-)

/Per

----
Per Cederberg
http://www.percederberg.net/