[Openmcl-devel] undo size

[Raffael Cavallaro]

On Jun 15, 2011, at 5:27 AM, Tim Bradshaw wrote:

> Unless autosave works for every keystroke, it would definitely not be a substitute for undo/redo for me, or anything like it.  I completely rely on editors being able to undo / redo *every* change I make, however small.

You shouldn't conflate what you want from a programmer's editor with what most users will want and expect from most applications.

Versioned documents can certainly mean that beyond a certain time depth you lose fine grained undo. That said, this is what most users already do; they do not rely on a fine grained undo stack of unlimited depth.  At some point most users save the document or a version of the document, close it, and by doing so, lose the undo stack.

The only real issue is "what is the appropriate depth of a fine grained undo stack for this particular application?" For a programmer's editor is is quite large. Not so for most applications. Most users don't need 200 levels of fine grained undo; they need maybe a tenth of that and versioned documents.

Most importantly from a developer perspective, users are going to get versioned documents from Apple apps; Mac OS X applications that don't provide users with autosave and versioned documents are going to seem oddly non-native, much as applications that don't implement window title bar icons seem like non-native ports now (I'm looking at you, LispWorks).
 
warmest regards,

Ralph


Raffael Cavallaro
raffaelcavallaro at me.com