[Usability] GEdit, Leafpad and Office Suites

[weibchen cosmopod com]

Dear Community,

With regard to text editors, I believe the approach employed by KDE, of having 
different text editors for different audiences, has significant merit.  
Although all text editors are primarily aimed at the input and manipulation 
of text, there is such a great variation between what is required by a coder, 
scripter or other people who undertake a great deal of data manipulation and 
those who want a basic utility for jotting down information and so on.

There is already a good and extremely popular basic text editor tool developed 
for GNOME called Leafpad.  It would be good to see this included in the core 
of GNOME.  Development effort could then be invested in making GEdit into a 
tool that is approximately the equivalent of Kate.  The user needs of two 
extremely diverse audiences could the be met.

At the moment, I think it would be fair to say that GEdit does not really meet 
anyone's requirements.  It lacks block-selection, good syntax highlighting 
and numerous other features needed by coders yet it is not fast and simple 
enough for low-end users.

I am also in agreeance with the previous poster who referred to Lotus 
Smartsuite.  This was definitely by far the most usable suite I ever 
encountered.  The interface was incredibly elegant.  

I definitely think that Calum's people should investigate and research this 
office suite further as there are lessons regarding the user interface that 
could be applied to Star Office/OpenOffice.org