[Kommander-devel] KTextEditor in Kommander

[Eric Laffoon]

On Thursday 10 August 2006 2:39 pm, Michal Rudolf wrote:
> Eric Laffoon,  czwartek, 10 sierpnia 2006 23:34:
> >> This is the biggest problem. The editor widget is embedded to a dialog,
> >> and not into the mainwindow. This is somewhat unusual usage of a kpart,
> >> as for example you cannot access the main menu while the dialog is
> >> shown. Also the fact that Kommander does not use the KDE XMLGUI to
> >> build its user interface makes merging of a part and the main
> >> application interface rather hard, if not impossible.
>
> Kommander Editor uses really a lot of ancient technologies. Welcome to the
> museum ;-)

I thought you said it was more barbaric than ancient. ;-)
>
> >> > 5) bookmark ability, probably with context menus
> >>
> >> It is possible, but of course have to be re-implemented, due to the
> >> limitations in 2). But i shouldn't be hard.
> >
> >I'm not sure how much Kommander needs bookmarks,
>
> I don't think it does. Find & replace will be much more useful.

I would not argue, and that's a really obvious miss on my short list.
>
> > However this does bring up one irritation. There is no
> > way to easily revert changes. I'm not sure how easy this might be to do
> > since we're closing the file. I don't want to put a lot of work into
> > this. Would it be much work to make an edit save a temp file which would
> > save history to make reverting easier?
>
> I don't think we need to close file - we just need to save it. The problem
> with undo is that we are changing edited texts (switching functions) all
> the time, so it is an equivalent of editing a lot of small files in Kate.
> We would need some operation history for undoing it. Of course, it should
> be possible (but quite complicated if we want to merge it with Designer's
> undo).

I absolutely do NOT want to merge it. The problem is that when you undo in 
Kommander you can't see what exactly you're undoing. So it's a bit of a 
nightmare. It would be nice to be able to rollback a set of changes, but for 
undo I'd like to be able to simply have a context menu/key combination. 

Another idea for this is to offer named temp files or set x number of backups, 
like 5 or 10. This way you could try changes and roll back everything. 
Because Kommander dialogs are so small, saving the last 10 saves as backups 
would not really eat much space and would be sort of like a real basic zero 
effort single user RCS rollback. Most dialogs can go on the mailing list, so 
backing up the last 25 saves would likely be under 1 MB. Maybe we could even 
add the parameter to a dialog if it's critical?

This also brings up the issue that there is no saving of what is in work if it 
crashes, which would of course be nice. However what I want now is just what 
can be done quick and easy that will make Kommander more attractive to create 
with.
-- 
Eric Laffoon
Project Lead - kdewebdev module