[Ipe-discuss] Stylesheet usability

[Tim Hutt]

Hi,

I really love IPE, but a long-time usability issue for me is editing
stylesheets. There are two main issues:

1. It doesn't seem possible to have an embedded style-sheet - if I want
just one file to be a weird size I have to make a stylesheet specific to
that file, and then remember to copy it around with that file. It's a bit
awkward. An implicit "(embedded)" stylesheet would be great.

2. In the stylesheets dialog there is a convenient Edit button but I have
never actually successfully used it because it always tells me there is no
text editor configured. I assume to do that I have to edit the `prefs.lua`
file which is ... somewhere... This is usually way more hassle than I want
to deal with so I give up. I can think of two good solutions:

  a) Use an editor provided by the OS, e.g. using `open` on Mac, `xdg-open`
on Linux, etc.
  b) Provide a built-in editor. This can literally just be a dialog box
with an edit box in it. That is still 100 times better than "Sorry no
external editor defined"

If there is a sensible default editor you could also make
`App->Preferences` (or whatever the equivalent on Windows is) open
`prefs.lua` in that editor so I don't have to go hunting through app
bundles for it.

Cheers,

Tim

PS: Hope that wasn't too ranty - it's just a small annoyance in an
otherwise excellent program that I have let build up rather than actually
fixing it...
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