jumping

[Andrew Abernathy]

On Sep 17, 2005, at 5:44 PM, Clinton MacDonald wrote:

> It turns out that I really *like* the "jumping" style of window  
> adjustment while entering text or editing a document. The half-page  
> "jump" brings my new line of text to the middle of the page, and I  
> can see below and above it for better appreciation of the context.
>
> It turns out that I *hate* the "jumping" style of window adjustment  
> while *scrolling* through passages of text.

This makes sense to me. I have a different scrolling pattern while  
reading - I typically use the scroll button on my mouse. But I can  
see how your pattern would be greatly interrupted by the current  
centering behavior.

However,  I'm not sure if your solution really works for the common  
case in OmniOutliner. Unlike in the case of a simple plain text  
editor (such as editing code), in OmniOutliner it is very common for  
different rows to have different line heights, because of parent vs  
child styles, or the presence of attachments, which are a frequent  
element of OmniOutliner documents. In that case, scrolling a single  
line will not result in consistent amounts being scrolled in the  
document - hit a larger font size (or a line with an attachment,  
especially an expanded image, for example) and the scroll amount is  
going to be much larger than normal. Unlike now, in that case the  
scroll amount is not going to be predictable.

If line heights were typically consistent, then I think I would be  
pretty enthusiastic about your suggestion. However, if the common  
usage of this pattern is to scroll while reading at a point above the  
bottom of the window, and documents commonly have varying line  
heights, then we might actually get the worst of both worlds -  
unpredictable jumpiness.

I'm interested in how many people affected by the jumpiness are  
affected because they are using the arrow keys for simple scrolling,  
or for a different pattern, and what those patterns are.

-andrew