[Usability] Re: Text wrapping in gedit

[Roberto Piscitello <robepisc freemail it>]

Eric Larson <elarson <at> novell.com> writes:

> 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. 

I think gedit developers do a wonderful work in keeping gedit GUI clean
and simple, as it should be for a generic text editor, but allowing other
kind of uses through extensions.
You may say this is lack of focus on a particular user base, and I can't
say you are totally wrong.  I think it would be fair to define gedit as
dual focused: on generic users and on casual programmers.
If this two focuses don't interfere, I think it is a great advantage for
both user groups, because, often, the distinction between these two groups
is quite faded.
Many people mostly use gedit to read text, but sometime open a script or a
HTML page from Epiphany.
If gedit didn't do syntax highlighting, they would feel uncomfortable but
wouldn't bother to download and install a programmer oriented editor only
for that.  They would keep using the uncomfortable gedit.
I could say the same about the spell checking feature, or the tab oriented
interface.
Luckily gedit has some advanced features, for the ones of us who feel the
world isn't black and white, but sometimes some compromise must be done.
And gedit do it in a way the user doesn't even realise a compromise has
been done.

To verify that every powerful functonality in gedit is absolutely
unintrusive, try and disable every extension, and you'll see that the only
menu item which has something to do with programming is the syntax
highlighting submenu.

That said, I would be interested in some comment about the merit of the
discussion: text wrapping in a generic text editor which sometimes has to
open some script or source file.
What do you think about the proposed solutions?