I suppose there needs to be more global settings, and for each of them, perhaps provide four settings instead of two. Using soft-wrap as an example, they would be:

Forced on - Forces soft-wrapping to be ON regardless of bundle-specific settings.
Default on - Respects bundle-specific settings, but defaults to ON where bundle does not specify.
Default off - Respects bundle-specific settings, but defaults to OFF where bundle does not specify.
Forced off - Forces soft-wrapping to be OFF regardless of bundle-specific settings.

I agree with most of the other discussion also.

Regarding identifying why a line is styled as it is (e.g. orange and in italics), perhaps a simple solution would be to simply show the style information for the current cursor position by holding down a modifier key, or by providing an option in the context-menu called "Show style information" that displayed in a tooltip or window overlay all inherited styles at the position of the cursor. This I imagine would be much less work than providing something equivalent to the inspector in most web browsers.

Tom

On 3 February 2014 14:27, Matt Neuburg <matt@tidbits.com> wrote:

On Feb 2, 2014, at 7:38 PM, Trevor Harmon <trevor@vocaro.com> wrote:

> I certainly agree this procedure is not very user-friendly, but is it still the way to go? Or have things changed in TextMate 2?

My ideas are very inchoate and I appreciate the discussion of the opposing point of view, so please keep countering me.

My thought here is: It is wrong to look for user-friendliness in TM2.

Non-power users of TM2 are probably not going to be capable or desirous of changing _anything_; they will love the text editing features and will learn to use them, in the same way that I use TM for editing and running Ruby or writing Markdown without worrying about _how_ it works behind the scenes, but they won't do any tweaking.

Anyone, on the other hand, who does _any_ tweaking is promoted to a power user! And such a person, I argue, _will_ have to make these sorts of non-user-friendly adjustments. To make a non-user-friendly way to let non-power users do what power users do would dilute and confuse the program. TM2 is like emacs: you can take what you're given or you can make adjustments, but there is no naive user-friendly way to make those adjustments, nor should there be. TM2 is like Flammarion's woodcut:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flammarion.jpg

Either stay on your side of the universe and enjoy the beauty of nature, or peek behind the curtain and blow your mind. There is no middle course.

m.

--
matt neuburg, phd = matt@tidbits.com, http://www.apeth.net/matt/
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