Re: [Evolution] "Why I hate Outlook"

[Jamie Zawinski <jwz jwz org>]

Jeffrey Stedfast wrote:
> To: John <jsk29 cornell edu>; evolution helixcode com

Evil semicolon.  Evil.

Completion is great, but completion-by-default is not so great.
It's really nice to have completions displayed automatically as
soon as they are available, but you should have to take some explicit
action to accept a completion, like hitting tab.  I think the emacs
completion mechanism is near perfect -- the only thing missing is having
completions displayed at all times (or, say, when there are fewer than
20 or something like that.)

I think that either showing dimmed-out-text-to-the-right-of-the-I-beam
or showing a drop-down-list-that-auto-updates-and-that-you-don't-have-
to-explicitly-dismiss are both good ways of doing it.

There are some cool data structures for storing dictionaries that let
you do completions really fast, though they require some pre-chewing
(basically you make a tree with a node for each letter, then share
common sub-trees.  It ends up not taking up much space, while letting
completion-like traversal work really fast.  Takes time to generate the
table, though.)

-- 
Jamie Zawinski
jwz jwz org             http://www.jwz.org/
jwz dnalounge com       http://www.dnalounge.com/