Re: [Usability] Text wrapping in gedit

[Eric Larson <elarson novell com>]

Hello,

On Sun, 2005-10-02 at 17:28 +0000, Roberto Piscitello wrote:
> 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
> 


I may be taking this question the wrong way but to me it indicates an
issue that has little to do with preferences and more to do with
purpose. I am sure others have argued this before, so I won't say much,
but the question comes to mind as to what the purpose of gedit really
is. It seems there is a movement towards a source code editor, which in
my view eventually evolves to an IDE. My impression that gedit fills the
notepad type of application more so than a generic text editor that is
meant to handle many kinds of programming. With that said, it seems like
there should then be two versions of gedit. Possibly a simple, "gedit"
application (word wrap on by default) that is for editing/viewing text
like notepad does. Another might be "geditor" (probably not that name of
course) that could be more extensible and handle things like multiple
wrapping guidelines. I say this because I don't believe the preference
has as much impact on the usability as does the lack of focus when it
comes to purpose. Just my two cents and I apologize in advanced if this
is inflammatory. I do hope it helps. 

Eric Larson