Re: [Usability] Text wrapping in gedit

[Kirk Bridger <kbridger shaw ca>]

Not to add to the flames, but I've founmd Gedit to be slow loading and
cumbersome for that very reason.  When I have a simple text file I need
to quickly read, I don't want to wait 10-15 seconds for Gedit to launch.

I've discovered Leafpad that exists to emulate notepad in Windows.  Fast
launch, no frills text editor.

Gedit is much more than that.  If you're frustrated with Gedit for this
purpose, check out Leafpad.

Back to our regular programming now.

Kirk



On Sun, 2005-10-02 at 13:58 -0400, Eric Larson wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
> 
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