Re: editor settings list

[jeroen <jeroen xs4all nl>]

On Fri, 24 Aug 2001, Dirk Vangestel wrote:
> > I agree however that you want some sort of grouping
> > in the preferences
> > dialog. I've tried to do that with the list i sent.
> > Please comment
> > directly on that list (which options do you consider
> > "generic").
> 
> I'm only suggesting a different kind of grouping: one
> that is common to all editors, and one that is
> specific to scintilla. Which those are is not that
> important right now, since we only have one editor
> component anyway. It'll probably change once we have
> more editors implemented (which is a bad thing, but
> probably unavoidable). It also depends on what
> settings are deemed essential for a gIDE editor. For
> instance, if fonts or colors are put in the 'generic'
> category, you're excluding a whole range of editors.

OK, so we delay creating generic & specific preferences groups until we
have more than 1 editor component.
 
> [snip gconf]
> 
> > I'll try reading that asap. I don't understand what
> > you mean by
> > "bonobo-conf is even worse". 
> 
> Well, you say there isn't even an 'apply' possibility.
> So forget about 'cancel' and 'revert' then. PoNG has
> 'apply' 'ok' and 'cancel' but no 'revert' if I
> remember correctly.

What meant was that the bonobo-conf preferences dialog DOES have an Apply
button but it's always disabled. I don't (yet) know how we can enable that
button.

I think the usability people have sufficiently argued that Apply, OK and
Cancel are the correct buttons for preferences dialogs.

> > How would you differentiate between the current tab
> > size or the
> > system-wide tab size? I think the behavior you want
> > only comes from the
> > fact that current applications only apply settings
> > on startup (while
> > bonobo-conf listens continuously for changes).
> 
> Not listening to changes is one extreme, but having
> all instances react is the other extreme. The latter
> is definitely an improvement, but more confusing for
> end users. For lots of applications it's probably the
> best way to solve the consistency issue, but not so
> with something as generic as an editor.

I've been thinking about this some more and all i can come up with is
this: simply have 2 tab-width settings, one for local and one for
system-wide settings. This is the only way that i can see that it would
work.
 
> > Plans for language-specific settings have not been
> > made (there has been
> > some discussion between myself and jpr & campd and
> > they think we should
> > just have a single setting that would apply to all
> > languages).
> 
> Why? Is that also something that's too hard to
> implement, or just because it's thought to be
> unnecessary?

IIRC jpr & campd argued that it would be confusing/unnecessary for normal
users. This is still up for debate though.
 
> [snip one dialog vs. multiple dialogs]
> 
> > Maybe i wasn't entirely clear about the other
> > settings: the remaining
> > settings (project, debug, plugins etc.) would all be
> > contained in 1
> > dialog.
> 
> So why make the editor special? Just curious.
> 
> > The idea is that each plugin has 1
> > preference tab.
> 
> We discussed that at GUADEC. We concluded that was
> going to be ugly, since some plugins have way more
> settings than others. But it may be the only practical
> solution.
> 
> > The only problem with the editor settings is that
> > the scintilla
> > component will probably have something like 3 or 4
> > tabs (at the least). 
> > So if these settings were to be displayed in the
> > general preferences dialog,
> > the dialog wouldn't be usable anymore (JBuilder uses
> > the same principle btw).
> 
> I don't see why. If you add 3 more plugins, you'll
> also have 3 more tabs in the dialog. The problem does
> not go away by just removing the editor settings from
> that dialog.

The problem is one of UI design/usability. Having lots of tabs in a
notebook is considered bad practice (there's an Interface Hall of Shame
(http://www.iarchitect.com/tabs.htm) that has some very good examples 
of bad notebook/tab practices). This is the reason that i want to move the
editor settings to a separate dialog. 

You probably won't be able to fix this for the general preferences
dialog since you can't control how many plugins the user has loaded. It's
up to him/her to organize those plugins (unload them maybe using your new
plugin manager, which is very cool btw, but has 1 very visible bug:
initially, it thinks that there are no plugins loaded, while the opposite
is true).

> [snip editor idl]
> 
> > I only looked in /usr/share/idl. There doesn't seem
> > to be a lot of editor
> > idls there. I *think* gIDE just queries oaf for
> > components that can
> > display the specified MIME type.
> 
> That's for querying which components there are. But
> then you still have to know how to talk to those
> components, so you need to have an interface. Take a
> look at the EditorBuffer interface.

I'll do that when i get home.

Jeroen