KEEPing it simple — fix the Keep menu!

Well, endless refinements but any of these changes would be about 176% more time than was put into the layout in the first place. It looks like way too much of the "mirror the code" settings, terminology and thought I had to argue against back in the days when I worked more closely with what we used to call programmers.

Not sure that frequency of use is a strong factor; making it Previous/Next follows logical layout thinking. And an overall rethink of the panel to integrate Previous/Together/Next would be worth considering as well.

But mostly, I just want to stop banging my head on the desk when I hit each new post of "Why won't that last line stay in the first column? I've checked EVERYTHING!"

I would "gray out" the line numbers until the check box is activated. That would make it clear what option the line numbers refers to.

Well, to me this is an outlier among ID's many small faults. It throws many, many newcomers — we see some variation of "why won't my paragraph stay together" at least once a week. It has been known to throw the more experienced here, who don't think of the setting (or, sometimes, notice it in screen caps!) until several rounds of suggestions for fixes. It may not reach the level of a critical flaw, but it's persistent and frustrating and completely opaque until a user simply "learns" that the two settings are wholly independent, not interactive as the UI suggests.

And it's a case where there is no functional flaw or bad implementation or fault in the features themselves — both keep-prev and keep-next work about as perfectly as they could be asked to.

So it's all down to a badly designed snip of UI that does not make it clear that the two settings are independent. The fix is entirely on the cosmetic end, with one tiny improvement possible by making Keep-With-Next a specific toggle and not a murky "inherent" setting

That everyone here with some degree of experience knows all this is not any reason for this not to have been fixed long ago, because it's still collecting trophies from among every new/learning wave of users.