Re: Compose window - to address entry wierdness.

[Berend De Schouwer <bds jhb ucs co za>]

On Wed, 15 Nov 2000 11:00:08 Ian Campbell wrote:
> > > Probably me... this tends to annoy me on a daily basis, so it _will_
> > get
> > > fixed. :-)
> 
> It annoys me too. 
> 
> > 
> > As the author of the *cough* broken *cough* alias expansion, it annoys
> me
> > too.  I've been meaning to fix it for the last three weeks, but I never
> > got around to it.  Excuses, excuses :).  I may actually try again
> > tonight.
> 
> Has anyone considered the way galeon does it (it is optional in galeon),
> if
> you press tab then a popup window appears which contains all possible
> completions and you may use Up and Down to select the one you want, this
> way there is no munging with the content of the edit box, typeing simply
> works as normal, but will reduce the number of options in the drop down.

The main problem for me is a drop-down window appearing (flashing really)
in widely different sizes while I type.  This can be avoided by using a
small delay - and maybe a keystroke can force it to pop up now.

An alternative is the way Netscape does (or did) completion in the
Composer.  Type "bob" and press ^K - if it matches you get
"bob (Bob Jones <bob@jones.com>)".  The text between () is highlighted.
This avoids the flashing, but you can only see one address at a time.
It might be faster on LDAP, since you can respond as soon as you get
the first address from the server.

Both methods seperate user input from expanded output, until you accept.
That definitely makes the job a lot easier, and maybe more intuitive.

The drop-down method has been suggested multiple times, so it may be
a nice feature for a lot of people.  In KDE you can select the type
of auto-completion to some extent - it offers me "none, semi, and auto".
Is there a preference?  Do I really need to download and look
at the Galeon source? :)

> > The code is broken as designed, I believe.
> > 
> > There are three identified problems:
> > * keys (',', tab, end, ...) have to do different things, depending on
> > what
> >   happened previously (it did or did not expand an alias, user used
> mouse
> >   to move the cursor, etc.) but the code doesn't keep proper track of
> >   the state.
> > * It uses "select" to highlight the text.  This is bad.  It breaks
> >   cut-and-paste, and reacts counter-intuitivily to backspace and
> >   delete.
> > * It needs to load the whole addressbook into GCompletion().  This is
> >   fine for a local addressbook, but is bad for big LDAP books.  It
> >   should wrap around ldap_search().
> 
> For this I believe a search method should be added to
> LibBalsaAddressBook,
> then it can be implemented by the subclasses (using GCompletion for the
> VCard book and ldap_search for the LDAP one.)
> 
> Ian
> 
> -- 
> Ian Campbell
> Churchill College, Cambridge.
> 

Kind regards,				  
Berend                                  

-- 
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Berend De Schouwer, +27-11-712-1435, UCS