[OS X TeX] TeXShop on Tiger: Reply to Bruno

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 6 mai 05 à 18:10, Richard Koch a écrit :

> In general, accepting Apple's design decisions leads to stable  
> code, while trying to force changes leads to instabilities and  
> compatibility problems in the future.

I can but agree wholeheartedly with that!

> In earlier versions, we handled keystroke shortcuts ourselves. In  
> 2.01, I just accepted the default PDFKit behavior. So the left and  
> right arrow keys move the display horizontally, the up and down  
> arrow keys move the display up or down by a few lines, the page up  
> and page down keys move up or down by a page, and the home and end  
> keys go to the start and end of a document. Moreover, space goes  
> one page down and shift-space goes one page up.

Page-Up, Page-Down, Home and End are all very convenient navigation  
tools. However, on a PowerBook I never figured out how to use these:  
Page-Up appears on the Up arrow, Page-Down on the Down arrow, Home on  
the Left arrow and End on the Right arrow. I tried all key  
combinations I could think of (Cmd-Up, Shift-Up, etc.), without ever  
getting them.

>> I second the request, made last week-end, of being able to hard- 
>> wrap text in TexShop. Possibly a switch enabling "Hard Wrap As You  
>> Type", and a command "Hard Wrap", pretty much as for spell checking.
>
> There are two problems with this common request.
>
> The most serious is that I wouldn't use this feature. It is  
> dangerous for a programmer to add a feature for others but not use  
> it himself, because then the feature doesn't get seriously tested.
>
> Since I don't use editors which work like this, I have some really  
> elementary questions. If I'm typing a line and it gets too long,  
> the cursor reaches back to a word ending and moves the text after  
> that word to the next line. But what happens if I edit in the  
> middle of a line? Do words at the end sort of dribble down to their  
> own lines? What happens if I copy and paste? Do lines get  
> reformatted? Etc. Etc. Pretty soon, what sounds like a simple  
> change requires modifications all over the place.

I was thinking of an interface "à la Textures", with:

- A switch "Hard Wrap As You Type", similar to "Spell Check As You  
Type", and such that text is hard-wrapped each time the  cursor  
reaches the right edge of the window, or a user-specified position in  
its line (like 80 characters).

- An item "Hard Wrap...", similar to "Spell Check" but applying to a  
selected area, and using the same rules as above. This would allow  
hard-wrapping a portion of text that has not been hard-wrapped yet,  
or correcting the wrapping of text that has been modified as you  
described. It wouldn't be convenient probably to hard wrap a whole  
document, as hand-placed line breaks are desirable for mathematical  
formulas and macro definitions, in particular.

I'm advocating this since I had got used to it during years of  
practice of Textures. Hence I'm certainly biased, and there may be  
more efficient and straightforward ways to proceed.

Bruno--------------------- Info ---------------------
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