Big history full of stubs
This is primarily a design issue, which may need resolving.
I use gedit a lot in my daily workflow, mostly for drafting comments, emails, messages, documents, though also for working through problems and for transient notes. I've switched to gnome-text-editor
some time ago, and have been using it every day.
It has been great that I no longer have to worry about saving these many transient notes. At the same time, this also creates some issues:
- I often have lots of open tabs, filled with crap
- The recent document list contains lots of documents, which are hard to differentiate
- Many of the autosaved drafts are stubs which I actually wanted to throw away, and it's hard to tell the difference between the interesting ones I might want to go back to, and the ones that I know will never be useful again
- Browsing the history is annoying, because the sidebar closes each time I open a document, which I need to do to figure out what it is
My use case is potentially a bit specific and outside of the Text Editor's scope, and it would be good to gather some more data about how the autosave behaviour performs for other people.
That said, a collection of ideas for how to deal with this issue (these are unfiltered and may not all be good):
- Longer snippets of the first line in the document list, sliced at the word ending rather than by number of characters
- Show the date & time when last edited
- Keep the sidebar open after a document has been selected, and have it switch the document of the current tab, rather than opening selections in new tabs. This would make it more like a history browser.
- Don't restore tabs on restart (or, maybe, don't restore draft tabs)
- Add an obvious way to remove (or even trash) a document altogether, both in the sidebar and when editing