[texworks] Early thoughts

[Dave Crossland]

2008/9/19 Jonathan Kew <jonathan at jfkew.plus.com>:
>>>
>>> Please don't. ... Or at least provide the user with a single
>>> switch to suppress all these clever additions.
>
> It's clear that there are widely varying points of view about this stuff!

:-)

> Bruno, don't worry: I expect to keep the default TeXworks behavior pretty
> simple and clean. I'm not opposed to "assistive editing" tricks, but I do
> think these are an "optional extra" that users should explicitly choose, if
> they wish to use them.

Yes - simple to turn them on and off totally, and straighforward to
edit them via a text editor for those who want to :-)

> The existing "command completion" is one example of this: it's available,
> but it doesn't interfere with typing in any way (like some auto-complete
> mechanisms might); it only takes effect when explicitly requested via the
> Esc key.

As part of the configuration, I'd like to be able to change the ESC
key to another key - TAB or # or \n - because it is so far from the
'home keys.'

> a low-volume user I find it easiest to just type exactly what I want.
> Perhaps it's not a bad thing if users first learn ... by typing it all
> themselves, before discovering that the editor can produce
> this from just a few keystrokes.

I agree that its not just "old timer TeXXies" who want it off, and
doing everything manually is a good learning experience.

Perhaps the program could display a notice in some _unobtrustive_ way
after the user has manually typed something that could have been
autocompleted - perhaps just a 'lightbulb' icon in the status bar that
when clicked would pop up a 'message of the day' style information
dialog?

-- 
Regards,
Dave