Re: [Usability] Text wrapping in gedit

[Paolo Borelli <pborelli katamail com>]

Il giorno dom, 02/10/2005 alle 17.28 -0400, Eric Larson ha scritto:
> Again, I do apologize for being inflammatory. I left a comment on
> bugzilla regarding the issue.

No need to apologize, my response was a bit harsh because I wanted to
prevent that kind of generic discussion which I feel would be
unproductive. I'd really like to keep this thread focused on the issue
of per document vs default settings. 

>  I think wrap by default and keep the
> preference hidden. Most folks don't want to side scroll.

I'd like to underline that having word wrap on is already the default,
it has been for a long time and we agree that it should stay that way
(modulo some possible euristic).

Let me state again that we are very committed to keeping prefs to a
minimum, that's why this bug has been open for so long and why I
rejected the approach of having both a pref and a menu item. However
this is not one of those cases of "let's pick a good default and leave
the geeks play with gconf". I can assure you that requests for word
wrapping come in very often from our userbase and very often not from
the "experts" (which in fact just tweak the pref and get on with life).

To make some example use cases: there are people that need to deal with
txt reports of other programs that include tables and thus should not be
wrapped, other people that need to make sure they're document lines have
a fixed lenght etc. This cases are not easily cought by a euristic based
on the mime type and this user should not be frustrated by the lack of
ability of making gedit behave as they need.
Incidentally we often also get a request for a variant of line wrapping
that really inserts a \n when reaching a certain column, though we have
for now avoided this complication.

This is not a so simple design choice as it may look initially, that's
why it has been lingering for so long. If someone has bright ideas for a
solution I'm all hears, what I wanted to stress out is that we value
ease of use a lot, but at the same time we take into high consideration
the frustration caused by a tool which makes difficult for the user to
make the tool suits his needs.

Keep in mind that the userbase of a text editor is very variegated and
it's not so simply split between the 'casual user' the double clicks on
a text file downloaded from the web and 'the hacker': there are
scientists and students which write latex documents, there are sysadmins
who needs to read and modify configuration files, people writing simple
html etc etc


ciao
	Paolo