[TextMate] Heuristic for smart typing pairs

Drew McLellan lists at allinthehead.com
Wed Oct 20 16:30:49 UTC 2004


Justin French wrote:

> ... but I think in practice, it will take a lot of thinking before a 
> real solution is found... no quick patch here :)

Thinking about this more (I spoke too soon) ...

The most important thing has to be that the smart typing is *completely* 
predictable. In order to not get in the way, I think it's more important 
for smart typing to get in the way occasionally but predictably, than 
for it to get in the way sometimes and pleasantly surprise the user 
other times.

If you know that typing '(' always gets you a ')' then you can quickly 
learn to delete the ')' if you don't need it. However, if you have to 
stop to think what's going to happen, or worse still, predict wrong and 
end up deleting something you didn't want to, then the feature has failed.

So I guess I'm saying it's better that the feature is simple and 
reliable that too clever and difficult to predict.

drew.



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