[TextMate] Preferences window (was ProFont)

[Drew McLellan]

Sune Foldager wrote:

>> Can I place a vote for following Mac OS UI convention where possible?
>> I fully applaud the philosophy behind no prefs window, but as a user I 
>> spent my first few minutes using TextMate frustratedly hunting for the 
>> prefs.
> 
> Why? Did you need to change some setting you couldn't find anywhere? Why 
> is looking through the relevant menu (view for view-related, behavior 
> for most edit-related etc.) so big a problem?  I don't see that it is.   
> IMHO of course.

I needed to change a setting. App menu > Preferences was the *first* 
place I looked, because the convention is that that's where settings are 
kept. I didn't look through the menus - why would I? That's not where 
you set preferences.

>> App menu > Preferences is a convention that 99% of users will be 
>> familiar with. 99% is a lot of people to annoy, no matter how good 
>> your underlying philosophy.
> 
> So you think that people will actually be _annoyed_ by this?...  I 
> should hope it takes more to annoy people... the advantage of this is 
> that there are hot keys for most things that you then can change 
> quickly, without venturing into a prefs window.

Yes, it annoyed me. It doesn't take much to knock a user off his stride.

It's a longish read, but a valuable one:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/fog0000000249.html

An important extract:

"So that's what days were like. A bunch of tiny frustrations, and a 
bunch of tiny successes. But they added up. Even something which seems 
like a tiny, inconsequential frustration affects your mood. Your 
emotions don't seem to care about the magnitude of the event, only the 
quality."

drew.