On Oct 20, 12:14 am, Daniel Gackle <danielgac...@gmail.com> wrote:
> < For the case
> doc|ument
> where "doc" is typed and "ument" is the completion offered, TAB key
> completes after R8080 on 1.7, will be in 1.7a4, 1.6b3. >
>
> Now it's my turn to be lost. I don't understand what you mean at all.
>
> The specific bug I'm reporting is the one you confirmed by saying "If
> I type TAB, the selection is accepted and focus moves to the address
> bar". This is clearly a bug, because after completing a function name
> one naturally types "(", only to discover one is now typing in the
> address bar. Is what you're saying above that this bug will be fixed
> in 1.7a4 and 1.6b3? That would be great.Yes, please try Firebug 1.7a4, http://getfirebug.com/releases/firebug/1.7X/ > > < I guess you mean "completion". I'm not sure what "auto" means here. > But again I cannot guess what you mean by 'pop up' and 'invoke'. Do > you mean the panel that comes up when you type 'd'? > > > I'll say "completion" from now on. "Pop up" refers to the panel that > comes up when typing 'd' on Windows. On Ubuntu (in 1.7a3) I see no > such panel. Rather, text appears when typing 'd'. As far as I can > tell, this text appears in Windows as well. Yes, ok that makes sense. The completion panel does not work on Linux due to bugs in Firefox. > > Apart from the above bug, I have two general complaints. First, the > way > that Firebug 1.7a3 does completion (as opposed to 1.5.4's way) is too > intrusive. Second, what it's doing with text selection is nonstandard > and therefore jarring. > > By "too intrusive" I mean that the program is over-eagerly assuming > that it knows what I want to do. (Clippy came to mind as an extreme > form of this anti-pattern.) Perhaps I just want to type something > unrelated to any symbol in the program. Why should the completion > feature intervene when it can't possbily do any good? I don't want the > program to make assumptions about my intent. There isn't *any* program > that can do that perfectly, and when it gets my intent wrong, flow is > broken, interrupting my thought and making the tool feel clunky. Why would you want to type something that can't possibly be valid? I'm not asking this to confront you, I am asking to try to understand. > > Rather, what I want is an easy way for me to use the feature when I > need it. That's all I mean by "invoke". For example, in 1.5.4, I can > invoke completion by hitting TAB the first time. Before I do so, the > completion feature is comfortably out of the way, not consuming any of > my attention. Once I hit TAB, though, I have signalled the intent to > use the feature, so it's appropriate for the completion interface to > appear, for subsequent TABs to cycle through options, and so on. But your design conflicts with our desire to have completion discoverable. That is why I changed the command line in the first place. Every change in Firebug will make some people unhappy. Sometimes the change will make a few people very unhappy. I'm sorry for that, its just not always possible to make things only better for everyone. > > Does this make sense? I don't know that I have the ability, let alone > the time, to be any more explicit. Yes! Thanks! > > If the 1.5.4 approach is so unobtrusive that some users fail to > discover the completion feature, I can understand your desire to have > it show up by default. In that case, I wish you would add a setting > for those of us who *want* it to be unobtrusive. I don't mind going to > a configuration window and choosing a setting. I work in Firebug every > day. Configuring it once per install is a small price to pay. Just so > this is crystal clear, though, let me repeat: I'm *not* asking for a > way to turn off completion altogether. I very much need that > feature. Rather, I'm asking for a way to make it so that Firebug only > brings up the feature when I explicitly signal that I need it, > preferably by hitting TAB. I understand that configuring Firebug may be a small price for you, but from my side the price is much higher. Every option doubles the number of cases needed for testing. The automatic regression testing cost is part of it, but the bigger part is the cost of triage on bug reports which already consumes a lot of my time. > > Finally, the way that 1.7a3 completion uses the visual appearance of > text selection to indicate something entirely different than text > selection is nonstandard. I've encountered a lot of examples, but > since this post is long and we're having trouble communicating, I'm > going to focus on just one, based on the example you brought up. When, > in Firebug 1.7a3 on Ubuntu, I type 'docu', Firebug displays 'document' > with 'docu' in plain text and 'ment' with background shading. What I I asked the experts at Mozilla to help me change the style of this shading to make our UI clearer. They were not able to figure it out so far. > see is visually indistinguishable from what I would see if I typed > "document" in a text editor and then selected "ment" with the > mouse. The trouble is that Firebug is not doing text selection at all, > but something quite different. In a text editor, if I proceeded to > type Backspace, "ment" would disappear. But in Firebug, the text > selection is extended back to include "u". This suddenly and > unpleasantly puts me in a world where longstanding expectations are no > longer valid. I can understand why the UI leads you to be surprised here, but I don't know how to fix it. > > My point isn't to report this as a bug so much as to express that > there are many ways (like this one) that Firebug 1.7a3 defies my > expectations about what happens when text that looks selected is > displayed on the screen, leading to a frustrating typing experience. I appreciate your efforts at replying to clear up these issues. > > I followed your suggestion to look at what Google does, and the > difference is instructive. Following the above example, if I type > 'docu', Google appends the text 'mentaries'. However, they are careful > to make this look very different than text selection (i.e. different > from what I would see if I typed "documentaries" in a text editor and > then selected "mentaries" with the mouse). I notice two differences: > > 1. "mentaries" is not text with a shaded background, but rather > faint grey text with no shaded background; > > 2. A flashing cursor appears very prominently between "docu" and > "mentaries". > > Because Google's interface doesn't visually look like text selection, > there's no confusion and no jarring experience. I completely agree with you but I am powerless to solve the problem. jjb > > This is about the best I can do to express these points > unambiguously. It's not obvious to me whether the above will be > helpful. I do rely on Firebug every day and get a lot of value out of > it, so these things are kind of a big deal, at least for the class of > users I belong to (web programmers). > > Daniel -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Firebug" group. To post to this group, send email to fire...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to firebug+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/firebug?hl=en.
