[squeak-dev] Re: Is there a preference setting to block automatic parentheses?

Bert Freudenberg bert at freudenbergs.de
Tue Feb 24 03:25:28 UTC 2015


(moving to squeak-dev)

> On 22.02.2015, at 14:40, Chris Muller <asqueaker at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>>> Some people like this preference a lot. Others think it is horrible.
>>> 
>>> This implmenentation is not the best. The one in E/OCompletion is better.
>> 
>> I love the feature (in other editors), but hate its current behavior.  If that one is better, why don't we use that?
> 
> This preference is part of the low-level interface which affects the
> overall fidelity of the Squeak user-experience.  If we are going to
> make any changes to this, may we please start it out in the Inbox

The onus is actually on whoever enabled this feature by default before it was mature, IMNSHO. Until we fix it properly (see below) we need to turn it off.

> where we can all try it and discuss it in more objective terms than
> "love", "hate", "better" and "horrible"?

"Horrible" is a technically accurate description in this case ;)

Because it interferes with the user's wishes. It gets in the way unless you consciously anticipate how it's going to mess with what you type. And it doesn't have to, as other editors clearly demonstrate.

If I am blindly typing
	(foo)
I expect to end up with
	(foo) 

In current Squeak I end up with 
	(foo))
which is clearly wrong and extremely annoying and makes me hate the feature.

For an editor that gets it right, try ACE online ( http://ace.c9.io/ ). If an editor does auto-insertion, it *must* keep track of that and anticipate the user typing the corresponding characters. E.g. in ACE I can type
	[('foo
and get 
	[('foo')]
but then I can proceed to type
	      ')]
end it will just skip over the auto-inserted part. Similarly in Squeak when typing
	[(2)+(3)]
it results in
	[(2)+(3)]))]
but in ACE it gets me
	[(2)+(3)]
which is so obviously right I'm not even sure how anyone could argue Squeak's is not horribly broken.

So, as others have pointed out, it's not that we don't want the editor to be helpful, it is a very useful feature, but it must be mindful of what the user wants.

- Bert -

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