Re: [Evolution] "Why I hate Outlook"

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj stampede org>]

I liked both your ideas for solving the problem
a drop-down or something would probably be easier than grey lettering to
the right of the I-beam, but either would be fine by me

and I agree 100% that completion by default is not good

btw, what's so evil about a semicolon? :)
better than ILOVEYOU :-)

Jeff

On Thu, 04 May 2000, Jamie Zawinski wrote:
> Date: Thu, 04 May 2000 20:03:15 -0700
> To: evolution helixcode com
> From: Jamie Zawinski <jwz jwz org>
> Subject: Re: [Evolution] "Why I hate Outlook"
>
> 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/
-- 
Spruce: I con't do it Cap'n...I doon't have the POWWWEERRRR!!