kdevelop (Re: Proposal to plan for "Milestone Releases" on the way to KDE4)

[Maks Orlovich]

On Friday 27 January 2006 17:37, Michael Pyne wrote:
> On Thursday 26 January 2006 09:27, Dominik Haumann wrote:
> > We changed it due to a request of a user. If you and others - or better
> > the majority - find the old behavior better (insert "", '', {}, (), [])
> > we should revert it. The problem is in general how to say what's the
> > best, due to _lack of feedback_, which raises the question: _How_ to get
> > good feedback?
>
> I can't even begin to describe how annoyed I get by code that automatically
> tries to fill in little things like extra spaces or braces.  That's also
<Snip>
> But that's just me.  Trying to do it so that it makes everyone happy is

It's not only you :-). I know all the emacs-people are complaining about the 
kate/kdevelop not being smart enough with text indentation, so let me whine 
back: when I tried emacs, the major thing that annoyed me was it trying very 
hard to make my code look like RMS would want it, not how I wanted it. And,  
of course, its poor substitute for a GUI hardly made disabling it easy.
(Anyone replying with a elisp command for doing it will get bonus points for 
irony. And no, I do not want to spend a year learning to use a text editor)

Kate in constract was a pleasure to use immediately: all it made me do for 
indentation is press tab at the beginning of block, backspace when ending.
It may be 2 "extra" keystrokes, but a)I type faster than I can think up code 
details anyway b) it wasn't fighting me c) it's a reasonable thing to do for 
about 99.99% of coding public, and not just those unfortunate enough to work 
on GNU projects.

And, when they added the "Smarter" C indenter, which didn't work so hot for my 
style (I sometimes write code "upside down"), at least there was some GUI 
there to turn the darn thing off.

The point of all this is: IMHO "smart" features should be as non-intrusive as 
possible[1], and easy to turn off. And, if they screw up, it should be easy 
to fix the output, and not have them screw up again.

[1] Kate's WordCompletion plugin fails a bit at that --- if you have a word 
that triggers a completion popup at the end of line, and you blindly enter it 
and press enter, it'll complete it. But at least it wouldn't keep completing 
the word if you go back and fix it :-)


-Maks