[TxMt] Re: Indented soft wrapping

[Matt Neuburg]

On Feb 2, 2014, at 7:38 PM, Trevor Harmon <trevor at 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.

--
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