On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 2:15 AM, Christian Lenz <[email protected]> wrote:
> Of Course, it will increase a bit of the complexity but it is as it is. > This shouldn’t really not a reason why not doing this. > IMO, maybe it should. From an oldie but a goodie: *Pull up the Tools | Options dialog box and you will see a history of arguments that the software designers had about the design of the product.* - Joel Spolsky - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/12/choices/ I was around for the original rewrite of the options window - the BeanTreeView with a property sheet that somebody mentioned used to be around as the "advanced" view. Now, part of that was the fact that, as we learned the hard way with videotaped usability studies, the tree + property sheet interface was completely baffling to a lot of users. But a lot of it was the sheer volume of options - who actually wants to customize "Editor scroll jump insets"? You could. The *job*, in creating usable software, is to make good choices about defaults, so nobody wants to customize them. The way to abdicate that responsibility is to avoid choosing "let's make that an option". Everybody has some little thing they'd like to be able to tweak. And for many of them, there are two people in the universe that will ever tweak them. The overwhelming lesson of the data about what options people actually used that we gathered was that most people customize nothing. Don't open Pandora's box. Today it's caret blink rate. What will it be tomorrow? If someone simply *must* have a non-blinking caret, it would be trivial to write a plugin that sets that one setting via its layer.xml - and given that in 19 years of working on NetBeans or being involved with it, this is the only request I have ever seen for that, a downloadable plugin seems like the right level of discoverability. People who search the web for "netbeans caret blink" will find it, but we don't pollute the UI with a setting for something almost nobody on earth is going to care about. And I say that, thinking, I'd probably actually like a non-blinking caret and install that plugin. But I am also, as one of its developers, not the target audience, and what makes me happy can drive others away. -Tim
