Re: [Usability] Text wrapping in gedit

[Eric Larson <elarson novell com>]

Hello, 

> 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.


First off, thanks for the use cases. It really helps to give an idea of
how applications are really used. I had not thought of the table
example. 

So, let's consider a user that has many files open and the wants some to
wrap and others to not wrap. I think it is generally confusing to have
options regarding creating a wrapping policy. It then makes more sense
that when a user has a document open, if they turn wrapping off (say on
a toolbar icon or in a menu (view -> wrap text)) then it is local to
that file. The confusion then comes with the tabs, since it seems it
should affect the program as a whole. An example of this problem is in
gaim with turning off the sounds. Users will look to the messenger
window not realizing that it is local to the specific conversation. When
there are more than one conversation, this becomes confusing. 

What I am trying to say is, what if we turned tabs off by default, and
went ahead and added a toolbar button for wrapping/no wrap along with a
menu item. Just brainstorming :)

Eric

PS The above gaim scenario has been tested with the results mentioned.