Skip to content

Draft: Autocomplete feature

Gabriela Bittencourt requested to merge gabrielabittencourt/purr-data:autocomplete into master

This adds a dropdown menu with completions from the completion index when the user creates a new object, message or comment, and starts typing. Note that this index is initially populated with objects from the search index of the help browser. As the user types object names, arguments, messages and comments, they will be added to the completion index as well.

Entries from the menu can be chosen with the cursor up and down keys. The enter key can then be used to select an entry and insert the corresponding completion. Alternatively, clicking with the mouse also selects an entry.

NOTES / TODO:

This is a very first implementation of autocompletion for purr-data, and as such it still has a few minor quirks and shortcomings:

  • Help index completions: Completions from the help browser's index will only be available once that index has been built. By default, this happens when the help browser is first launched. However, you can change this so that the help index is automatically created when purr-data launches, by ticking the corresponding checkbox in the GUI preferences. This will make sure that completions from the help index are always available, even before launching the help browser for the first time.

  • Prefix matches: As shipped, completions will encompass all matches of the typed text, even within an index item. There is an option to select prefix matches only in the code of the search_obj() function in pdgui.js. Currently changing the code is the only way to get this behavior; there should probably be a checkbox in the GUI preferences to make this easier.

  • Tab completion: There is no binding for the Tab key in order to select a default completion yet, so currently you have to use the cursor keys and enter or the mouse to select a completion. This will hopefully be added in the future.

  • Stale completions: At present, there is no way to remove "stale" completion entries, such as obsolete entries from the help index, or manually typed completions which haven't been used for a long time. There should probably be a way to do this in a (semi-)automatic fashion, but at present the completion engine offers no support for this.

  • Disabling option: At this MR the user won't have the option of disabling the autocomplete feature. May be nice to have a checkbox in the GUI preferences to enabling and disabling this feature.

Note: This MR shall be accepted after the MR !798 (merged) and a proper re-basing.

Edited by Gabriela Bittencourt

Merge request reports