Style guide decision needed (was: [Kopete-devel] Bug#40938: behaviour change request)

[Martijn Klingens]

On Mon, 29 Apr 2002, Antonio Larrosa [iso-8859-1] Jiménez wrote:
> >  Besides I have not seen good arguments that
> > a multi-line edit is bad.
>
> Enter doesn't submit isn't enough?

Then I have a strong counter-argument for you: even if you write only a
single line of text, then I bet that line is very often longer than your
line edit is wide. And maybe you're different than the average user, but
the lack of word-wrapping in a line edit is extremely annoying if you want
to quickly re-read your message before sending. It's about my biggest
usability gripe against all IRC clients, actually.

> Just go to any average user and ask him:
> "When you're talking with another person using your computer and you finish
> writing a line, what key would you press to send your message to the other
> person?". I'm 100% sure he'll tell you "Enter", and if that's what the
> users expect, that's what we should give them by default.

When I finished writing a *line* I press enter to go to the next line,
only when I finish writing a *message* I go looking for the key to do that
:-)

> Btw, talking today about this with another "average user" (another
> mathematics student, this time MSN and IRC user) he told me another reason
> why he thinks single lines are more useful : When he's talking with
> another person he doesn't want the other person to be waiting until he
> finishes writing 3 lines, it's better that he send them asap, so that the
> other person doesn't get desperate waiting for him to say something, so
> submit is the most used action, so submit must get the easiest key binding
> possible, and that's Enter.

Yes, and that's exactly what I *don't* want to do because 99% of all cases
you do this people start responding to an incomplete message. MSN solves
this because you see 'User Bla is typing a message', which is tightly
integrated into the protocol. Most protocols don't know about this
concept, so this is not useful in the general case.

Martijn