Re: [Usability] What happened to Undo?

[Gregory Merchan <merchan phys lsu edu>]

On Fri, Jun 06, 2003 at 12:37:08PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 06, 2003 at 11:31:21AM -0500, Gregory Merchan wrote:
> > Once upon a time GNOME was supposed to change to instant-apply control
> > panels with the forgiving feature Undo and possibly a way to restore
> > system defaults.
> > 
> > What happened?
> 
> Someone has to write the code. Nobody has yet.

Is doing so on anyone's TODO list?

I'd once started to write an action stack for this purpose, but dropped it
for school (or something) and because I felt I was getting in over my head.

One question that plagued me was how general Undo support should be. Should
it be suited for use by all applications in every way? Might it just be
for the limited case of control panels?

Also, I think it would be ideal if making the control panel with widgets
tied to GConf keys would automatically hook up the Undo stack.

Another thing that stymied me was compressing the stack. When text is
typed in an entry, Undo should perhaps be word by word rather than letter
by letter. I have only a vague notion of how to do that.

Didn't Mr. Lebl have code or an application to make this work?

Is it correct that unsetting a GConf key restores system defaults?
(I haven't looked at the GConf API in a while, so I don't recall what
 unsetting a key is.)


Cheers,
Greg