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Preferences: "Line wrap" should NOT affect "Highlight curren

Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2015 11:27 pm
by RBVanDyke
For oXygen XML Editor 16.

In Preferences, in Editor —> Edit Modes —> Text, selecting Line wrap disables Highlight current line.

I wish the two weren't forcibly interconnected in that way.

I'm generally able to work with Line wrap cleared (not selected). But if I for some reason choose to long lines, I'd rather not have that choice forcibly disable Highlight current line.

If my choice to wrap long lines creates an undesirable interaction with my choice of line highlighting, then I'd rather be able to use configuration options to put eaach of those two settings as I want them to be. Forcibly disabling Highlight current line based on Line wrap's settings needlessly takes my control of the editor's display behavior away from me.

Cheers & thanks,
Riley
SFO

Re: Preferences: "Line wrap" should NOT affect "Highlight cu

Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2015 11:09 am
by adrian
Hello,

I have logged a request on our issue tracking tool to try and accommodate both features.

AFAIK, it was decided to disable "Highlight current line" when "Line wrap" is enabled due to some technical problems the line highlighter has when the active line spans across several editor lines (due to line wrap).

Regards,
Adrian

Re: Preferences: "Line wrap" should NOT affect "Highlight cu

Posted: Mon Mar 02, 2015 8:43 pm
by RBVanDyke
@Adrian:

Thanks for the quick reply.

I'll mention in passing that two open source editors that I use — gVim and jEdit — do support highlighting of wrapped lines. Depending on how a structured text file is put together, those editors' highlighting of wrapped lines can sometimes become visually confusing or counter-productive. So then I turn temporarily disable line highlighting in that file.

The key point is that if at all possible I'd love to have the choice…

Cheers & thanks 'gain,
Riley
SFO

Re: Preferences: "Line wrap" should NOT affect "Highlight cu

Posted: Tue Mar 03, 2015 4:57 pm
by adrian
@Riley:

I see your point. I've included your comments on the feature request from our issue tracking tool.

Regards,
Adrian

Re: Preferences: "Line wrap" should NOT affect "Highlight cu

Posted: Wed Apr 15, 2015 1:03 am
by RBVanDyke
Adrian:

With regard to gVim's or jEdit's line highlighting, I believe they do it right by doing it simply.

In those editors, if line wrap is on, and the insertion point (a.k.a cursor) is somewhere within that wrapped line, then only the portion of the wrapped line containing the insertion point is highlighted. The effect regardless of whether or not line wrapping is active is that one and only one horizontal line in the text editor is ever highlighted.

Stated another way, if line wrap is on, the objective is not to highlight the entire wrapped line from end-to-end, but rather only the portion of the line containing the insertion point.

In those two other editors, I find that behavior entirely intuitive: Line highlighting helps me determine where I am in a file. So highlighting an entire wrapped line is unhelpful because it isn't helping me identify my current position. Showing me which portion of a long wrapped line the insertion point is currently located is, on the other hand, informative.

Make sense?

Cheers, thanks, & hope this helps,
Riley
SFO

Re: Preferences: "Line wrap" should NOT affect "Highlight cu

Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2015 5:29 pm
by adrian
Hi Riley,

Thank you for the analysis. I've included it on our issue tracking tool.
We will notify this thread when this is implemented.

Regards,
Adrian

Re: Preferences: "Line wrap" should NOT affect "Highlight curren

Posted: Mon Aug 10, 2015 7:38 pm
by RBVanDyke
I still would really like to see this changed (dare I say fixed?).

Is not the reason to highlight a line in an editor to aid navigation as in, "Where am I in this file?" When the editor is configured to wrap long lines it's more helpful from a navigational perspective to highlight in the editor the single line containing the insertion point rather than highlight the complete line of wrapped text from first character to EOL. The first approach answers the "where am I?" question more effectively than does the second.

In all the other text editors I've worked with, navigational assistance is provided by highlighting the single horizontal line in the editor that contains the insertion point. Key point, that: All the other editors.

There are lots of things I love about the overall design of oXygen: Wow, what an amazing set of tools contained in a very well-designed system!

But I find it truly annoying that I can either highlight my current position in the editor or wrap long lines, but not both. I really wish this could be fixed because I'm now living in a world of every other editor's line-highlighting behavior versus the oXygen editor's non-standard line-highlighting behavior.

Cheers & thanks,
Riley
SFO

Re: Preferences: "Line wrap" should NOT affect "Highlight curren

Posted: Tue Aug 11, 2015 11:44 am
by Radu
Hi Riley,

About this remark:
When the editor is configured to wrap long lines it's more helpful from a navigational perspective to highlight in the editor the single line containing the insertion point rather than highlight the complete line of wrapped text from first character to EOL.
Right now we would mostly incline towards highlighting the entire block containing the visually wrapped line of text.
In what precise editors that you used have you seen only the visual current line being selected?

Regards,
Radu

Re: Preferences: "Line wrap" should NOT affect "Highlight curren

Posted: Tue Aug 11, 2015 6:51 pm
by RBVanDyke
Actually I re-checked and it's only jEdit that works the way I want it to. I use jEdit so much that it became my "normal". 8^p

BUT the essential point remains that in oXygen, IF in Preferences —> Editor —> Edit modes —> Text I select Line wrap, THEN oXygen 17 disables Highlight current line.

Why does it do that? As you indicated, other editors can sustain both line wrap AND line highlighting.

I'd also love it if that when remediating that oddity if one also had a control that allowed line highlighting to be applied to the entire wrapped line (ala gVim, Notepad++, et al.) or to the single line containing the insertion point (ala jEdit.)

Cheers and THANKS! for your reply,
Riley
SFO

Re: Preferences: "Line wrap" should NOT affect "Highlight curren

Posted: Wed Aug 12, 2015 9:16 am
by Radu
Hi Riley,

We'll try to remove this limitation in a future version and we'll update this forum thread when we do.
Probably we'll settle for the most common approach (Notepad++ behavior) in the initial phase.

Regards,
Radu

Re: Preferences: "Line wrap" should NOT affect "Highlight curren

Posted: Fri Feb 05, 2016 10:21 pm
by davidkt
Hi,

I just stumbled across this discussion which is now 6 months old. Apparently the issue hasn't been addressed yet, so maybe it's not too late to post a suggestion:

I use oXygen XML Author on a Mac, and I need to edit XML files that contain very long lines (it's basically annotated text, so whole chunks of text kept on a single line with annotations everywhere in the middle of the text). However, as was noticed by the OP, when soft line wrapping is enabled, current line highlighting is automatically disabled. The problem in that case is that, as I say, I'm navigating in very large chunks of text that can span across more than 10 soft-wrapped lines, so obviously highlighting the complete hard line where the cursor is will not help me one bit. Instead, highlighting only the "physical text line" where the cursor is (i.e. always one single line) would be much more useful, actually exactly what I would like/need.

I'd like to point out that this (highlighting only one physical line in a soft-wrapped line) is the default behaviour of several editors on the Mac, including BBEdit/TextWrangler and IntelliJ IDEA. Also, from a visual and logical point of view, highlighting only the physically active line makes it possible to easily locate the whole chunk (soft-wrapped line) around it, whereas highlighting the whole chunk helps very little to actually locate the cursor/editing point (which IMHO is at least partly the point of this feature).

Thanks,

David

Re: Preferences: "Line wrap" should NOT affect "Highlight curren

Posted: Mon Feb 08, 2016 7:17 pm
by RBVanDyke
davidkt wrote:I'd like to point out that this (highlighting only one physical line in a soft-wrapped line) is the default behaviour of several editors on the Mac, including BBEdit/TextWrangler and IntelliJ IDEA. Also, from a visual and logical point of view, highlighting only the physically active line makes it possible to easily locate the whole chunk (soft-wrapped line) around it, whereas highlighting the whole chunk helps very little to actually locate the cursor/editing point (which IMHO is at least partly the point of this feature).
That's exactly my original point -- line highlighting is a navigational aid that helps me see where I am in the file being edited. So highlighting the line in the editing window that currently contains the insertion point (a.k.a. cursor) provides the best navigational assistance.

Cheers & thanks,
Riley

Re: Preferences: "Line wrap" should NOT affect "Highlight curren

Posted: Tue Feb 09, 2016 12:44 pm
by Radu
Hi,

I added David's input on the already opened issue that we have on our side. I will also try to increase the issue's priority and see what it would take in order to implement this on our side.

Regards,
Radu

Re: Preferences: "Line wrap" should NOT affect "Highlight curren

Posted: Thu May 05, 2016 10:07 am
by Radu
Hi,

Oxygen 18.0 should now allow the "Highlight current line" to work also with soft line wrap checked.

Regards,
Radu

Re: Preferences: "Line wrap" should NOT affect "Highlight curren

Posted: Thu May 05, 2016 6:46 pm
by RBVanDyke
Radu wrote:Oxygen 18.0 should now allow the "Highlight current line" to work also with soft line wrap checked.
Yes it does -- and it works BEAUTIFULLY! Christmas has come early this year.

With Editor -> Text -> Line Wrap enabled, oXygen XML 18 highlights the portion of the wrapped line that contains the insertion point, and only that portion. How wonderful -- thank you, thank you, thank you!

Cheers & thanks 'gain to all of you for this,
Riley
SFO