[pmwiki-users] Re: Perfection and Menus (WAS: onover-bundling) . . .

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Sun Mar 13 22:11:22 CST 2005


On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 03:42:26PM -0500, Radu wrote:
> As someone noted already, the GUI is a nice crutch as people learn the 
> basic text formatting rules, as well as for quick rendering of snippet-like 
> or template-like stuff in the edit area.

It's more than a crutch.  The GUI is also a handy reference tool to help
people recall the text formatting rules, especially for rarely used
markup sequences.  It also helps authors discover features they might
otherwise know are available (e.g., MimeTeX, PasteExcel, etc.).

> However, the wiki is a fast TEXT-BASED editing tool. 

I refuse to fall into the trap of trying to classify PmWiki as
either text-based or graphical based.  PmWikiPhilosophy #1 is
"favor writers over readers" -- in particular this means that we
should support authors that like editing with GUI-buttons as well
as those that think in terms of text.

> In fact was looking into adding keyboard-handling js to the edit textarea 
> in order to tie the GUI buttons I use to keyboard shortcuts, and provide 
> the option for advanced users to do away with the buttons completely. 
> (incidentally, has anyone looked into this already?)

This is a planned feature upgrade for the core.

> And I'm puzzled to see some people are so addicted to it that they want to 
> make it norm. I'm using a modified version, sometimes different for some 
> groups (yea, gotta really look into farming), so I have to override it, and 
> after each upgrade to do away with the default one. 
> [...]
> ...they have to re-do 
> their changes after each upgrade. Or they do a conditional extract of the 
> files in the archive to avoid the guiedit script and folder.

Why is upgrading affecting your overrides?  Upgrading shouldn't
affect any local modifications or overrides.  If it does, you're
either "overriding" things incorrectly or I've set it up wrong in
PmWiki.  But a fundamental tenet of PmWiki's design is that local
configurations should not be "undone" by an upgrade (especially a minor
one).  Indeed, this was one factor that led me to write my own wiki
rather than use other existing ones.

Pm



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