Improvements for distraction-free view

[smartmic]

Hi again,

the idea behind distraction-free view for editing is very good, I would like to use this for writing longer text.

In the current implementation, this view just makes Cudatext fullscreen and hides all panels/bars etc. But having a widescreen monitor, the view is still not very comfortable because the text is left aligned to the outer most boundary / pixel. The characters literally glue on the left monitor margin without any space.

I would love to see text in distraction-free mode centered with a wide padding, very similar like what FocusWriter does, see the screenshot on that page. Would this be also a reasonable feature for CudaText?

Kind regards,
Martin

[main Alexey]

Yes, it would be a reasonable feature. I guess we already has it via option-- "centering_for_distraction_free" (off by default). it was made to mimic Sublime at some level. is it enough, it maybe we need to extend this option to make the indent from LEFT side (not 'center')?

[smartmic]

Hi Alexey,

I tried the option "centering_for_distraction_free". Although its parameter is an integer, it has only boolean behaviour. Every value greater than 0 moves the left margin of the text to the center. The text stays left aligned. But this is not what I would expect and it does not help. 50% of the screen, i.e. the left half, is empty and text expands from center to right. In effect, this is a highly unsymmetrical view and definitely not "distraction-free"

It would help if we could set the left margin to a value. Even better would be to set also right, top and bottom margin, in the sense of having a padding around the text. And if the menu bar would also hide in distraction-free mode, this is would be a really good experience, same as FocusWriter.

All this is "nice-to-have", of course…

—Martin

[main Alexey]

that is not correct. you are right that SMALL values of "centering_for_distraction_free" gives only centering, but you need big values, from 80 and bigger. here I see good result with 100 or 110, - I have the 10-30 chars indent of the left margin. my monitor is about 19".

[main Alexey]

And if the menu bar would also hide in distraction-free mode,

that is difficult to do, so for example I don't give the sub-option of the "ui_fullscreen" option.

[smartmic]

that is not correct. you are right that SMALL values of "centering_for_distraction_free" gives only centering, but you need big values, from 80 and bigger. here I see good result with 100 or 110, - I have the 10-30 chars indent of the left margin. my monitor is about 19".

Yep, you are right! I just tried with a few smaller numbers , so I did not notice, sorry for that! (I thought the value counts from left…). Anyhow, this improves the mode a lot and I will find my best settings here.

Thanks!

[main Alexey]

I just added a note to the default-config: that user should set BIGGER values.