On 2012-05-16, John Beckett wrote: > Bram Moolenaar wrote: > > If a user switches off 'writebackup' he must be prepared for > > losing work. Perhaps this is not sufficiently clear to the > > user? > > > > Considering how very few times this problem occurs I don't > > think it is justified to do any work on this. Except perhaps > > a better explanation in the docs in some place. > > How about twweaking the error message? > > Vim currently shows: > "bad.tmp" E513: write error, conversion failed > (make 'fenc' empty to override) > WARNING: Original file may be lost or damaged don't > quit the editor until the file is successfully written! > > I suggest: > "bad.tmp" E513: write error, conversion failed > WARNING: The file on disk has probably been corrupted. > Do not quit until the file is successfully written! > Try saving it again after entering (nothing after "="): > :set fenc=
That is better. In this scenario, the user has edited the contents of the file to his liking and wants to save those contents to disk. He has also chosen the file-encoding that he wants. He doesn't know that the two are incompatible. He may not even know that it's possible for the two to be incompatible. The error messages above tell the user how to safely save the file contents. Neither tell him what the problem is, where the problem is, or how to get to the desired state of those contents saved with the desired file-encoding. That is, after a successful sequence of ":set fenc=", ":w", the user is still left without the desired file-encoding and no clue as how to change to it. It would be helpful to the user if the error message included a statement like, "Character at line 77, column 14 cannot be encoded with the specified 'fileencoding'." It that is too much work to implement, then at least ":help E513" should be more explicit about that particular error, the cause, and possible solutions. The error message might even suggest reading ":help E513" since that doesn't seem to occur to some users. If I have time this evening and no one beats me to it, I'll try to write up something. > Or, when writebackup is switched off, issue a clear warning? That would be really annoying, especially if the user knew what he was doing and did it often. Regards, Gary -- You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. Do not top-post! Type your reply below the text you are replying to. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php
