Re: [Usability] gedit's Save A Copy

["Liam R. E. Quin" <liam holoweb net>]

On Sat, 2005-02-19 at 22:20 +0100, Paolo Borelli wrote:

> As I already said to Murray, I'm not opposed to having this plugin off 
> by default if so is decided.
> 
> However I'd like to point out that we didn't think of this feature after 
> too much wine, but we got requests for it. Note also that this kind of 
> functionality is present in other text editors 

I think it's a pretty useful feature.

Long-term I'd still like to see an icon representing the current
document that I can simply drag onto a folder window, perhaps with
a modifier key (shift is usual I think) to save a copy.  The
experiments at Sun some 10 years ago with this model seemed
pretty successful.

In the mean-time, "save a copy" is pretty common in other programs,
although gimp is the only one I can think of immediately that
has it.  The advantage is that after "save a copy", alt-S (or
whatever) to save the current file still saves onto the original
filename.   For example, you could be sending a letter to five
people that's almost identical except for their names and an
introductory paragraph, and use save-as to make five very similar
files without any risk of putting the per-person changes back into
the master file.  There are other ways to do this (e.g.,
for i in james david patti simon joy; do cp master letter-to-$i; done;
vi letter-to*
but that's a very different style of working)

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin
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