Oliver Taylor wrote:
Does this have any advantage over the system-provided combination of control-command-D (which works with or without a selection).
One thing I don't like about the pop-up is that it appears for whatever word your mouse is hovering over. This command can work with a selection or caret placement. Which means for keyboard junkies, they can skip one more trip to the mouse.
The only other advantage is that you might prefer using the app to the pop-up.
I'm actually planning to make some sort of "Writing" bundle, with various commands helpful when writing prose. So far on the list of things I want to do:
1. A dictionary command that pops up a TM yellow tooltip of a definition when a shortcut is pressed.
2. A word completion command that allows a user to complete the current word with a menu of possible completions, hopefully including words added to the custom spelling dictionary, as well as any words in the current document.
3. A thesaurus command, that uses WordNet to show a menu with synonyms for the current word, in groups for each sense of the word, and possibly with some synonyms in submenus if there are too many senses, or too many synonyms within a sense.
4. A spell-check command, that either somehow uses the built-in spell-check, or pulls up suggestions from some other tool (aspell perhaps).
5. Some commands for getting better statistics than the current document statistics count. It would be nice to have a word count which knows how to ignore stuff in html/latex/markdown tags, etc. etc. (or maybe bundles can provide overrides to this command, and all call out to a single script), but it would also be nice to be able to get some readability statistics, such as counts of average word length, average sentence length, and maybe metrics like Flesch-Kincaid, etc.
6. It might even be nice to add some tools for checking grammar (flagging things like wordy sentences, etc.). There are some decent open-source programs for this, I believe.
7. We could have some commands for looking the current word/selection up in various online references. Immediately obvious choices are websters, wikipedia, and a generic google search, but it would be nice to allow people to add their own (I have access to the Oxford English Dictionary through school, for example)
8. Eventually it would maybe even be nice to have some translation facilities, etc.
Anyway, many of these things require some external program in order to function, so I was thinking we probably want to make universal builds of a bunch of these, and then give users a single download to install them all in a package.
I think with not too much work we can take John Gruber's [challenge][df], and toss it back at him ;). Can I get a hallelujah?
-Jacob
[df]: http://daringfireball.net/2006/10/hallelujah_autocompletion