A blinking Cursor is an eye catcher for those who are searching for the Cursor 
in a file of lot of lines. So this Thing is reasonable for some users. Sure we 
can’t handle all Little tweaks and Options and we shouldn’t but we should have 
a look what are the big cases for those users. One case, that I can Image is 
the delay of the Code completion. Me I don’t want a delay time, some others 
want them like not seeing the completion while typing, etc. This Thing is 
configuratble, but not via Options, only inside the files. This is one case 
where users want that delay customizable. There is a ticket for this too.

Yes there are good reasons for almost everything like do or don’t and we should 
think About it and let the user choose what they want. But if we have a ticket 
like, please do this and it will be implemented and some other creates a ticket 
with please do this, what is the complete opposite, this goes into differnet 
directions and then you only make one user happy with it. Sure 1 user could be 
100 and the other user could be 200 but we should think about that. You can’t 
make everything good and everything Default. And if you have a Default, it 
should be changeable. Maybe not everything but most of them.

Yes today it is the blinking Cursor and tomorrow it could be some other stuff. 
I’m for advanced Settings too, for such Settings. If the user is willing to 
click on that advanced Settings button, he should be able to Change whatever he 
wants and thinks, which could be inside of it. To give Defaults only to one 
user groul instead of a lot of more People, is not a good Point, in my opinion.
Things can Change so let the user/developer decide.

Cheers

Chris

Von: Tim Boudreau
Gesendet: Montag, 14. Mai 2018 09:07
An: [email protected]
Betreff: Re: Expose Caret Settings in Editor Options

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

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