On Feb 2, 2007, at 12:43 PM, Davor Cubranic wrote:
On Thu, 1 Feb 2007, D John Anderson wrote:
I was thinking of a palette that acted the same as the single line
text entry field, except that it contained space for more than one
line. As you typed new commands the old commands would scroll up,
giving you a history of previous commands you entered. Following
the conventions of other shells, typing up arrow might go back in
the command history so you could choose previous commands without
a lot of retyping.
You don't need multiple lines for command line history though. All
the shells that I've used that implemented this, simply changed the
contents of the bottom line on the screen when you backtrack
through the history. This is the case even in Emacs, where you do
have a proper screen editor, and I'm pretty sure it is to be clear
about what is being edited now vs. what was entered in the past. I
don't think it's worth the screen real estate in the end.
+1
The main problem is whether the single entry/search will be
confusing to the user. Maybe for discoverability it should be
search by default (the simple case) and entry on slash prefix (the
more advanced case), I don't know. The current spec is reasonable
enough to me (entry first, especially if automatically switching to
search on Cmd-F shortcut), but maybe that's because I know about it
already and because I enter new items far more than I need to
search for them by their contents. It will be interesting to try it
out in a5 and see what the initial impressions are.
+1, except I'd probably still prefer trying out a first cut of a
floating palette for quick entry, which I suspect is probably easier
to implement that the "/" drop down with search control in the toolbar.
Re: the shape of the text widget
Is it the rounded edge or the little magnifying lens that indicates
that it's a search widget? When the field is in the command line
mode, the rounded space could be used to indicate this, for example
put a ">" or something like that.
The wxWidgets search control is only a native widget on Mac, and only
has rounded corners there. On other platforms don't have a special
search control, so it it looks quite different and it is implemented
as a composite control with a search button, a text control and a
cancel button. I'm not aware of anyone who uses it for anything
besides search.
Davor
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