zim-wiki team mailing list archive

[Dotan Cohen <dotancohen@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 7 June 2010 14:45, Fabian Moser <e-mail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I concur. Otherwise it would be called "rich text editor" rather than "wiki".
>

It seems to me that the term wiki refers to the interlinked-pages, not
to the markup involved. Note that the word "wiki" means "quick" in the
Hawai'ian language, and it refers to the ease of editing the content.


> I believe, that's perfectly OK. If you want to be really fussy, you could
> make a dialogue pop up the first time a user interacts with the clipboard
> to let him pick his mode of choice (verbatim or formatted).
>

No! Use a same default. I personally don't care which, but don't give
the user a popup and a choice when he first pastes into Zim or types
something that could be interpreted as wikicode.


>> Ideally I would like a proposal that results in doing the right thing
>> in all cases without forcing the user to go through an elaborate set
>> of customization options.
>
> You could also scan the clipboard content for wiki formatting characters
> and pop up a dialogue, asking for normal or verbatim paste, in case some
> are found and otherwise default to normal paste.
>

That sounds slightly more reasonable.


> I'm personally a big fan of the KISS principle. Especially when it comes to
> software. Therefore I would avoid magic and dialogues and have the current
> standard paste and an additional verbatim paste with a separate short-cut.
> If "less technical users" need that feature, they can be expected to look into
> the docs (or the menu) for 10 seconds and read about the "verbatim paste" IMHO.
>

The issue is not limited to pasting. Typing will trigger the effect as
well, therefore in my opinion the setting should operate from the
assumption that the user is typing, and should treat pasted text just
as if it were typed in.


-- 
Dotan Cohen

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http://what-is-what.com