Re: Autocompletion

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Ricardo Fernández Pascual <ric users sourceforge net> writes:
> 
> The recent thread about a GnomeURIEntry ended without a real conclusion
> about autocompletion.
> 
> I have decided to take Galeon's autocompletion classes, clean them up a
> bit and post them here. I'm looking for a sponsor to add this to LibEgg,
> if there is interest.
> 
... 
> If there is interest in developing this I'll continue cleaning up the
> code and documenting it. I have written a small README (attached), but I
> don't think that it makes a lot of sense yet.
> 
> I think that having this as part of libgnomeui is a good idea, to avoid
> code duplication and inconsistencies between Galeon, Nautilus... and any
> other Gnome app or component that needs autocompletion (like the future
> file selection dialog).
> 

I think this is a good feature for GTK, and the fact that it works for
Galeon probably means it's pretty close to the right UI.  Definitely
having nautilus/galeon location bar behave consistently would be nice.

I see lots of small things in the code to comment on, but on a high
level, I think the autocomplete entry should be a subclass of GtkEntry
rather than of hbox, so you don't have to duplicate the functions such
as get/set_text. This may require GtkEntry changes but we can
certainly make those if required.

<thing I always say>
Again, remember that libgnomeui should be a glue layer between GTK+
and the desktop runtime. A general GUI feature that has no relation to
the runtime always belongs in GTK+ (if it belongs anywhere), not in
libgnomeui.

And over time, as the relations between apps and the runtime are
standardized and documented (along the lines of some of the
freedesktop.org stuff) and thus more stable/long-term, most bits can
move to GTK+ and we should see libgnomeui shrink.

We want a coherent overall platform and API, you can't have that if
you have GtkFoo and GnomeFoo for every widget.
</thing I always say>

Some interesting GTK bugs:
 
 combo box redesign with links to discussion:
   http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50554
   note that we want to replace GtkCombo with a nice autocompleting
   entry and a better option menu.

 fix GtkEntry to make it easier to implement completion:
   http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69613

Also I swear there was a bug or some list discussion on extending
GtkEntry to have an autocomplete feature built-in, but I can't find
it.

I'll look at the code in more detail and send along some comments, if
you want.

Havoc