Completion and right-click popups in the UI
Saturday, October 7, 2006
I’ve been pretty busy with my mathematics research lately as I’ve managed to prove some pretty nice results. However things have not all been quiet on the Factor front.
Documentation for the below features is forthcoming, but for now the
below is as good as it gets. You can press TAB to get a
keyboard-navigatable, automatically updating, buzzword compliant
completion popup:
If you press Up/Down to select a word followed by Enter, the word name
is inserted in the input area. Instead you can right-click on the word
to see a menu of other commands.
Now if you press C+e, you get the same popup, but instead it
completes loaded source file names; again pressing Enter opens the file
in your editor (if you’ve previously loaded a module such as
contrib/jedit
or contrib/emacs
) and a right-click offers another
option, running the file – note that this works for loaded contrib
modules too, not just core library files, and in the future there will
be a more extensive integrated module browsing tool than this:
Finally, you can press C+u to get a vocabulary completer, where the
default operation is to USE:
the vocabulary and from the popup menu
you can also browse it or IN:
it – this screenshot shows the popup
menu (yes its ugly):
Some of you will remember that the Factor UI used to have popup menus,
then they disappeared, then in the recent darcs release I started using
the three mouse buttons to invoke different object operations, and now
menus are back again. I have a hard time making my mind up on certain
issues, but my code does tend to slowly converge on a preferred
approach. In either case, I think its better than picking an approach
and religiously sticking with it, despite observations that it may be
better to do things differently.