[Pythonmac-SIG] Re: BBEdit questions (Russell E Owen)

[Lee Joramo]

First, these discussiong of the feature sets of editors would be better
served in lists dedicated to the respective editors. BBedit has an excellent
list. The folks at BBedit are very willing to consider feature requests. Now
sometimes they will balance several differnent factors and decide to make
the editor work a certain way which may not allow you to have your special
feature. Usually, these are cases where they are trying to prevent
confussing user interface, accidental user mistakes, or to comply with
Apple's design guide lines. I assume similar comments apply to Pepper too.

If you want infinite customization and extendiblity may I suggest emacs or
vi? They work just fine on OS X.


Now about modal search dialogs....

I am not sure what the advantage of a non-modal search dialog would be. I
find that in programs that have non-modal search dialogs, the search box is
always in my way and I have to exert extra effort to get rid of the dialog.
A prime example of this is MS Word.

In BBEdit once you setup your search, there are key sequences to continue
all of the search functions: Find Again, Replace, Replace & Find Again,
Reverse Direction of Find, etc etc. If I do need the Search dialog again,
all I need to to cmd-F.

The only time I personally would find a non-modal search somewhat helpful is
when construction complex search and replace greps. However in these cases,
you just need to hit the "Don't Find" button to set aside the current Search
dialog settings.


On 5/2/02 5:19 PM, "Chris Barker" <Chris.Barker@noaa.gov> wrote:

>>> - The find/replace dialog box is modal. In this day and age? That's
>>> taking "bare bones" too far! (Pepper does this right).
> 
> I have to agree with Russell on both of these. Modal Dialog boxes should
> be kept to an absolute minimum. At least OS-X doesn't have all those
> darn system-modal dialogs!