Re: [Usability] gedit preferences dialog

[Roberto Rosselli Del Turco <rosselli ling unipi it>]

Paolo Maggi wrote:
> Hi guys,

Ciao Paolo!

> 	I'm writing this mail for trying to get some help for improving the
> usability of the gedit preferences dialog.
>
> I'd like to use space in a more efficient way (there are lot of
> categories with only two o three preferences each) and I'd like to
> design the pages for the new options I'm going to add in gedit 2.4 (i.e.
> syntax highlighting, right margin, smart home/end).

A list of new options would help. Anyway, I would first re-organize the 
preferences tree as follows:

General

Editor

Plugins

Starting from the last item, I like the way GKrellM handles plugins: 
clicking on the main category you get a list of all available plugins 
(you now have to click on Manager), under the former you have a list of 
all activated plugins, if you click on one of them you reach its 
configuration options.

General should host all non-editing related option groups: Open, Save, 
Print (merging all current print options), Fonts & Colors.

Remaining options should be collected in two groups under Editor: 
Formatting (syntax highlighting, wrap mode, indentation, tabs, etc.) and 
Misc (undo, line numbers, right margin, smart home/end).

You could also think about doing withouth a hyerarchical tree (when you 
click on the main category you just get the gedit logo, which is a waste 
of space and a little frustrating) and consider an icon list like Galeon 
and many KDE apps do. This would mean rethinking the whole prefs structure.

> Probably some of the options, like the "display line numbers" one, could
> be moved to the view menu. How should I manage the default behavior in
> these cases?

I think that you should retain both: the prefs option should determine 
standard behaviour, while using the View menu you can change it on a per 
document basis.

Ciao

--
Roberto Rosselli Del Turco      e-mail:	rosselli at cisi.unito.it
Dipartimento di Scienze			rosselli at ling.unipi.it
del Linguaggio			Then spoke the thunder	DA
Universita' di Torino		Datta: what have we given?  (TSE)

  Hige sceal the heardra,     heorte the cenre,
  mod sceal the mare,       the ure maegen litlath.  (Maldon 312-3)