Re: [Usability] Text wrapping in gedit

[Paolo Borelli <pborelli katamail com>]

Il giorno dom, 02/10/2005 alle 13.58 -0400, Eric Larson ha scritto:
> 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. 


Please please please. This is the exact kind of pointless discussion
that I wanted to avoid when I expressed my concern to Roberto about the
utility of bringing up the isssue on usability list.

gedit is and wants to be a generic text editor and it will not be an
IDE. Sure it offers many features that are useful for code editing. Sure
it is extensible in many ways with plugins. So? Syntax highlighting and
plugins do not get in the way of somebody reading a simple text.

A large part of our user base are not 'hackers', but greatly benefit of
features like word wrapping, syntax highligting, current line
highlighting etc: we have many people writing latex, people looking at
the html source of web pages, people looking at txt logs that should not
word wrap.

Should we split Abiword or OO.o Writer in many apps because some of the
users do not use tables or $feature?

Let's not go the KDE way of having 12 text editors and lets concentrate
in making the text editor better for those who actually use it and at
the same time let's try to make the text editor be *less* needed on the
desktop there were it could be replaced by better apps (viewing logs,
taking notes, tweaking configuration files etc).


Making the text editor better means concentrating on specific issues: in
this case how to handle better word wrapping, making it better for the
casual user (for instance applying euristics to the default behavior)
and without frustrating user with specific needs.


Thanks in advance

	Paolo