On 17-aug-2007, at 19:00, Joachim Mårtensson wrote: Wow, this looks so promising. I can't wait to start using it.
Without mimicking Xcode too much, I think the user interface could improve. My suggestions: a. the bounding box of the dialog popup should be as small as possible, i.e. decrease the height of the window as the number of completions shrink.
I have changed the behaviour to work like this.
b. the dialog popup window could be slightly transparent and would be nice if it would fade in.
I am not to certain about the fading part, but some transparency could be nice.
c. the arguments to a function (the parts of the snippet that should be filled in by the user) could have a different style (italic?) or colour (greyish?) from the non-volatile parts of the function (the function name, the parentheses, etc)
I hope to be able to accomplish that, rememember however that the pop-up is to be a reusable component that can work with many different languages, the list of shown methods are given to the popup via a plist. And it will be up to the one supplying the plist to tell how the text should be displayed, I'll have to come up with some method of describing this though.
d. the addition of a little icon in front of the completion, indicating whether it is a C function, a objective-C method, a constant, a class, etc. (I know this sooo xcode, but I think it's very useful).
I find the icons nice to look at if perhaps not very useful, so I will probably give the option of supplying an image path to in the plist.
Finally: when does this completion window pop up? When you stop typing for a 0.8 seconds (and if *has* available completions)? Or do you have to invoke it with a special key combo?
It is currently invoked via a key-combo, ideally it would work as you describe, currently the onIy way I can think of to accomplish what you describe is if I inject the command permanently into the event stream, something I am certain Allan would not approve of. Allan has said that there will be additional ways of invoking commands in the future, perhaps something that I can use.
I would very much like the former one, combined with the disappearance of the completion window if no key is pressed in the following 2 seconds. (plus a way to customize these time preferences or disable the automatic popup behavior).
best regards dirk
Dirk van Oosterbosch de Wittenstraat 225 1052 AT Amsterdam the Netherlands
http://labs.ixopusada.com
thanks for the feedback Joachim Mårtensson