[Usability] Text wrapping in gedit

[Roberto Piscitello <robepisc freemail it>]

I post this message, after Paolo Borelli suggestion, to point you to bug #119428
on gedit.

The issue is about the text wrapping setting, which, being in the second tab of
the preferences dialog, is difficult to reach and very annoying since it needs
to be changed very often.
This is a global setting, but it seems there is a consensus on the necessity to
make it document specific.
At first it was proposed to add a new document specific setting, in the form of
a menu item: "View->Text Wrapping" and rename the one in the Preferences to make
it clear that it is a default setting ("Enable Text Wrapping for newly opened
documents").
Then some other proposals came out... (...suspense :-)

Here I paste some comments to that bug submission, and redirect you to bugzilla
(http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119428) for further informations:

==== From comment #8 (by me): ====
Another, and cleaner, solution would be to get totally rid of the default
setting in the preferences window and turn text wrapping on by default for each
document not recognized as programming source code.
If this euristic is wrong for a specific document, the user can always manually
set/unset a text wrapping switch in the View menu for that document (and of
course gedit would save this setting as document specific).

The whole idea is based on the absolutely opinable constatation (because it
comes from my personal experience and YMMV) that 90% of the times you want text
to be wrapped unless it is a source file.  We all hate horizontal scrolling:-)
Maybe there are other file types which should not be wrapped by default. For
example all setting files is /etc/* or with (or within a directory with) a name
starting with a dot. I don't know.
Or maybe this euristic would work only for me and is totally crap...


==== From comment #9 (by Paolo Borelli): ====
The 'analitic' solution (set the default in the prefs and override it for each
doc) is the more immediate approach, but I am somewhat doubtful that it offers a
good user experience: having the same kind of setting in two places is
confusing. For instance the casual user after seeing the menu item is even less
likely to look for the same setting also in the prefs and will be frostrated by
the inability to turn wrapping off for good.

The euristic approach is much more interesting, but poses the obvius problem of
how to handle the case where the user really wants something different.

Another UI idea that came to my mind is the following:
a submenu with

- wrap on word boundaries
- wrap on letter
- disable wrap
--------------
- set current wrapping as default

where the last item makes the current behavior the default.

====

What do you think?

Thanks in advance,
  Roberto