GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 101281
[ui-review] Undo preference dialog
Last modified: 2005-08-05 10:26:06 UTC
o Undo preference dialog Should have the following (o) Limit to [n] actions ( ) Unlimited undo or words to that effect
I was thinking about removing "Unlimited undo" feature.
That's kind of ironic, as the user is more likely to lose data by removing that option than if you removed the "limit to [n] actions" option :) Just out of interest, why are you considering unlimited undo? Just because of the memory consumption?
oops, "considering removing", I mean...
What do you think of the undo section of the new preferences dialog? I don't like it too much, but I don't know how to improve it. http://www.gnome.org/~paolo/screenshots/prefs-dlg-editor.png
As Calum pointed out, I'm not quite sure why there is a preference for "limited undo". Maybe in special cases people would want to change GConf to reduce the amount of Undo, but GEdit already has enough preferences for a "simple text editor" ;-) I have trouble imagining that the memory burden for unlimited undo would be too much for text edits. "Design interfaces around the central case, not around the edge cases".
I would agree with seth and calum on this one. Go with unlimmited undo by default, and maybe allow a gconf key to set a limmit value somewhere. Given that redo is implemented I think its the safe bet for the majority of users.
Created attachment 27726 [details] [review] Proposed patch This patch sets the default undo limit to "-1" and adds a comment to the gconf key saying that -1 means unlimited undo. It also removes the UI for setting the undo preference.
Adding PATCH keyword.
Abiword has had unlimited undo since very early in development and it manages to deal with more complex formatting and large embedded objects. I recently convinced Jody Goldberg to remove the option for limited undo from the Gnumeric Preferences dialog, although the functionality is still available in case anyone needs it. I'd agree with Seth, Calum, and Dowem.
Comment on attachment 27726 [details] [review] Proposed patch Sorry for the very late reply. The patch looks mostly good. There is only a problem we will have to face. Suppose the user already have on old version of gedit installed on his system and that he changes to 26 the undo_actions_limit. In this case gconf we will not see your new default but we will set to 26 the action limit and the user we will not have an easy way to change it. A possible solution could be to deprecate the old gconf key and add a new one.
See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for more info on gconf key backward/forward compatibility.
Created attachment 50262 [details] [review] Committed patch
Fixed in CVS HEAD.