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[StrongED] RFC; Changing the choices system



Hi All,

Working on some new StrongED features has reminded me, again, of the
somewhat fickle nature of StrongED's choices system. Changes made in
Mode Choices are sometimes applied to all views, the current view or
to no view.

The rules behind this are easy to understand:

 - Options that can only be set at mode level, eg font used, are always
   applied to all views using that mode.

 - Options that affect editing, eg inserting Tabs, are applied to all
   views on that text. This way editing is always the same regardless of
   view used.

 - Options that control how things look are usually applied to the
   current view only, eg wrapwidth.

Despite the reasons for this being easily understood it does annoy me,
and probably others, at times. For example, it's not possible to change
the font for the current view only even though that would technically be
possible.

In order to gauge what can/should be done to improve the situation I'd
like to start a discussion about the current choices system and how it
might be improved.

Here's my current reasoning:

Each setting is given a scope, with scopes nested like this:

   +----------------------------------+
   | Mode                             |
   |                                  |
   |   +--------------------------+   |
   |   | Text                     |   |
   |   |                          |   |
   |   |   +------------------+   |   |
   |   |   | View             |   |   |
   |   |   |                  |   |   |
   |   |   |                  |   |   |
   |   |   |                  |   |   |
   |   |   |                  |   |   |
   |   |   +------------------+   |   |
   |   |                          |   |
   |   |                          |   |
   |   +--------------------------+   |
   |                                  |
   |                                  |
   +----------------------------------+

Mode Choices would allow three sets of settings to be changed:

 - Mode settings
 - Text settings
 - View settings

In View mode you'd only be able to change settings that have scope
View (all other settings would be shaded) but they can be applied at any
level.

In Text mode you can alter both Text and View settings but they can only
be applied at Text and Mode levels, not View level.

In Mode mode you can alter all settings but can only apply them at Mode
level, not Text or View level.

The levels that I'm envisioning are:

 - This view
 - This text
 - This mode
 - All views
 - All texts
 - All modes

Here's a small app showing how this might look:
http://www.stronged.iconbar.com/archives/misc/cfgscopes.zip

If you have any thoughts on this then please join in!

Cheers,
Fred.

-- 
StrongED Developer
http://www.stronged.iconbar.com/

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