Comment 141 for bug 129403

-> toddandmargo

Yeah. This issue is older than the hills. Although not an early poster, this
coming Saturday will be my 4-year anniversary posting to this issue #.

Back in my almost 4-year-old post I wrote that I didn't think it was a bug per
se, but a poor design decision. Someone chose to _not_ show the visible version
of the space characters at the end of lines, or to allow the cursor to be shown
anywhere but smack up against the last printable character on the line.

A possible related issue is the decision to show the background of selected text
as a simple rectangle, rather than show the outline of the selected characters
(as the Big Boys do: MS Word and Word Perfect).

Yet another related issue is the behavior of centered text when you add spaces
to either end of that text, which is related to the behavior mclay observed.

It's all deeply intertwingled. I do not know the skill level of individuals on
the team, but could it be that the person assigned this bug feels overwhelmed by
the complex interdependencies? Or maybe this issue touches so many bits of code
that fixing it is a moving target, and the person assigned to this feels
overwhelmed for that reason.

Microsoft...

I was under the impression they all worked for Sun Microsystems. I mean,
Microsoft has a "real" word processor and therefore an ex-MS programmer should
know how to design a word processor without having to reinvent the whole UI. The
OO team seems like they just made up a pile of "stuff" and threw it into the UI.

I'm an ex chip designer, and spoiled by the hardware paradigm I'm crap as a
programmer (although I've had a touch of ANSI C in my day). I can't help but
wonder if an outsider tried to turn in code with a fix for this bug, would the
team accept it?