Future of code assistants

[Olivier J. G.]

On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 1:24 AM, Sven Brauch <mail at svenbrauch.de> wrote:

> Hey all,
>
> with an eye on RR 126763, how do you imagine the future of the
> assistants? To me it is clear after some testing that the current way of
> having it in the completion, while having some some advantages, will not
> work out well just like that.
>
> There's two options: either revert to the old behaviour; or keep it in
> the completion list, but that requires solving of some issues from my
> point of view: having it open up interfers with navigation through the
> code, so one would need to think of a way to prevent that. Also to allow
> sensible automatic invocation, I think we'd need to decouple opening the
> upper completion popup from the normal completion list (which would make
> sense for other situations like calltips anyways btw).
>

As the one responsible for leaving it in its current miserable state, I
think it
should simply be reverted for now.


>
> Maybe another idea to making it work with the completion list would be
> to make the upper part of the completion popup not keyboard-navigatable
> (and thus not catching the up/down arrow keys), and instead using the
> Alt+1 etc. shortcuts if applicable. The keyboard navigation in this
> widget never made sense for the use cases so far anyways.
>

None of the uses of that top widget really shine with the CC-like
navigation.


> What do you think? I'm actually quite undecided. At least for rename and
> add include, I like the workflow with the completion list better than
> the old workflow though.
>

Even rename is unusable with current KTextEditor API -- try backspace.

I think having all the assistants in that general area would work if...

1. They had correct priority with respect to each other
 -- Relatively easy
2. They didn't show up during automatic invocation
 -- Doable
3. They had unintrusive notification, with active keyboard shortcuts
 -- A bit of work
4. They were independent of the completion list (rather than reload it)
 -- Requires new API from KTextEditor

(KTextEditor could offer to set an arbitrary widget which appears above the
line when invoked and otherwise has some unintrusive notification, we
could use it to replace all uses of "argument-hint completion")

Whether or not you like this particular idea of how it should work, it
should
be pretty clear that there's lots to do in order to make anything of the
sort
work. I hope someone wants to take it up, but for now we need to restore
the original assistant popup.

Cheers,

-Olivier JG
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kdevelop-devel/attachments/20160118/57faef74/attachment.html>