Looking for auto completion widget

Jon Hylands jon at huv.com
Sat Apr 27 15:27:07 UTC 2002


At Saturday, 27 April 2002, you wrote:

>> Is there a morphic widget that will attempt to complete a field 
as you
>> type it in?  In other word, it has a list of possible values, and as
>> you type letters it shows the first one that matches.  You can keep
>> typing to refine the selection.

I haven't done this in Squeak, but a long time ago Anthony Lander 
and I wrote a cool browser for Visual Smalltalk 3.1, and one of the 
things we added to all the "type in a name" dialogs was an auto-complete 
drop-down text box. It did real-time matching of what you were typing 
from a predefined list.

One of the things that annoys me greatly with most auto-completes 
is when you want to type a word that is a subset of the one it matches,
you basically have to do several operations to delete the tail piece.
What we did to solve that was re-select the piece of text that was 
matched that you hadn't typed yet (after every character you type),
so when you got done typing your short word, you could hit delete,
and it would delete the rest of it. This ended up being very nice 
and fast, and basically minimized the amount of typing/mouse moves 
you had to do.

Just something to think about if you (or someone else) is going to 
add this to Squeak...

Later,
Jon

--------------------------------------------------------------
   Jon Hylands      Jon at huv.com      http://www.huv.com/jon

  Project: Micro Seeker (Micro Autonomous Underwater Vehicle)
           http://www.huv.com










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