[rkward-devel] Commands from script editor and console history

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

On Thursday 20 September 2007, Stefan Rödiger wrote:
> I consent in terms of single line. Here a yes. But I don't like the idea
> that multiple lines are added. I case of need for a command it's easy to go
> to the script editor window and to run it again. Therefore I did rather say
> no for multiple lines. By why not make it an option (hey after all it's
> still a KDE tool, thus don't break the KDE-law of "One can never have to
> many
> Options" ;) ).

I thought about it some more, esp. how exactly to add it, and how exactly to 
phrase that option. While doable, of course, differentiating between multiple 
and single lines just seemed to get rather convoluted. Also, I figured, I had 
not missed the addition of single lines to the console too much, before, so 
dealing with this in a special way did not seem worth the added confusion.

Rather, I added an option, which controls, whether "piped" commands (i.e. 
those originating from the script-editor, or help pages) are added to the 
history *in general*, or not. This option is on by default, as that is 
probably the least surprising behavior, but I think I'll probably turn it 
off, myself.

Well, it's kind of bad style to first ask for input, and then to act against 
your suggestion, but this just seemed to be the better way to go, when 
thinking about the implementation. Feel free to argue, of course.

Maybe in the somewhat longer term, we could also experiment with some 
different concepts, such as allowing the user to actually *edit* multi line 
commands in the console. So when you type a statement spanning five lines in 
the console, then notice you made a mistake in the first line, you will be 
able to go up and correct the mistake, without having to start all over 
again. This way, large blocks could also be added to the history as a single 
chunk, meaning it does not get as cluttered.

> This is a good point to start another idea. What about providing some
> script templates. This might be very useful for educational purposes (with
> comments ...) (though I doubt that many people use RKWard in such area),
> for some routine tasks, to give user an idea what they can do with R, or to
> show some interesting scripts R/RKWard user created during their daily
> work.

I've added a note to the TODO list. This might be generalized to offer 
a "snippets library/manager", where users can also organize their own code 
snippets (and even full-sized scripts), categorize those by keywords, offer a 
search, etc. Well, not exactly a short term thing, but it does sound like a 
useful idea.

Of course, if you have some good ideas on templates/snippets that might be 
useful starting points, go ahead and write them down right away. We could - 
for example - collect those in the wiki for now. Then they might be useful, 
already, without having to wait for the feature to be developed.

Regards
Thomas
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