[Qt-creator] command-completion

[Israel Brewster]

On Mar 30, 2009, at 9:50 AM, Adam Higerd wrote:

> NOVAimages wrote:
>> I also agree. If the mechanism of autocompletion exists, why not  
>> showing
>> it. It does no harm.
>
> Not everyone agrees with you. Auto-completion isn't always fast,
> obscures other things on the screen, and changes the behavior of  
> various
> keys on the keyboard (for instance, the space bar, enter, up, and  
> down).
> As far as I can tell, Creator doesn't have any way of disabling
> auto-complete, and even if it did I'm not sure people would want it to
> be COMPLETELY disabled -- people might still want ctrl+space to work,

Granted- which, I'm sure, is why XCode (the only other IDE i've  
personally used) has an option to set "Automatically suggest" to  
"Never" (for those who only want to see it when they explicitly  
request it), "Immediate" (for those who always want it), or "With  
Delay" (for those who are concerned about speed, but still want to  
access it fairly frequently- type enough characters to narrow down the  
list, wait a heartbeat, and viola!) - a feature that I would be happy  
to see added to QtCreator, although I would leave it on immediate  
myself. However, my comment referred (as I mentioned) specifically to  
those who WANT the automatic pop-up functionality - not to those who  
don't want it to automatically pop-up at all, for whatever perfectly  
valid reasons you can come up with. Those individuals are ALREADY  
going to be inconvenienced by the fact that it does pop-up by default  
when you start typing. I highly doubt that having the popup come back  
after deleting a character that made it go away is going to be  
noticeably more inconvenient. Or am I wrong about that? Perhaps  
someone who is in that position (not just theorizing about what people  
want) could confirm or deny? On the flip side, for those that DO want  
the auto-popup functionality in general (as I am one), having it NOT  
come back IS noticeably more inconvenient.

>
> and they might even still want autocompletion the FIRST time they type
> the word but not subsequently if they dismiss the popup (for instance,
> by pressing Escape).
>

So distinguish between a pop-up that went away because the user  
requested it (by pressing escape, for instance) and one that  
automatically went away because it couldn't find a match to the typo.

> And that last bit is particularly telling: If I've EXPLICITLY  
> dismissed
> the popup by pressing Escape, I don't want it coming back if I press
> backspace.

That I agree with. See above.

-----------------------------------------------
Israel Brewster
Computer Support Technician II
Frontier Flying Service Inc.
5245 Airport Industrial Rd
Fairbanks, AK 99709
(907) 450-7250 x293
-----------------------------------------------

>
>
> /s/ Adam
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