Re: autocompletion

* Jeff Waugh <[email protected]> [021125 14:20]:
> <quote who="Eivind Tagseth">
> 
> > It's slow and noisy.
> 
> Slow I don't grok - it keeps up with my typing, and I'm not slow. Noisy,
> perhaps, but does that warrant removing this affordance?

I guess your computer isn't as loaded as mine then  :)

> ><But I guess it makes sense to display it for a newbie.
> 
> You can't conceive of a situation in which it would be useful for a
> "non-newbie"?

Sorry, I meant `display it as default for a newbie'.  Of course some 
non-newbies would like auto-completion, but others, like me, would not.

> > As long as I can turn it off myself -- pressing TAB is much more natural
> > for me than for a Unix newbie I guess.
> > 
> > Heh... imagine auto completion in bash.  ough.
> 
> Pressing TAB still works, in addition to the affordance offered by the
> dropdown (which describes the possible tab-completes). In fact, bash *does*
> offer this feature, by providing feedback when you press TAB twice with no
> additional characters.

Yes, and I have no problems with the dropdown when explititly requesting it
by pressing tab, it's the 'auto'-part I don't like.  Personally, I don't like
windows of any kind popping up when I don't request it.  Other people might
have other preferences, people are different.  For a newbie, I think it's
probably best to enable auto completion by default.

> Some browsers don't show a list, but display a single likely completion (no
> doubt rated against most-visited sites) in the address bar. I think the
> advantage of visible choices far outweighs the 'cost' of the list being seen
> as 'noise'.

I agree.  This is similar to how bash and tcsh implemented tab completion in
the old days.

> Which brings us back to speed - surely the answer to that is "it should be
> fixed", rather than "let's add a preference to work around the breakage"?

I don't quite agree.  The question is not if we should get rid of the dropdown
or not, it's "should we enable it for each and every character the user types
or just when he/she presses TAB by default?".



Eivind


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