Saturday, October 07, 2006

Completion and right-click popups in the UI

I've been pretty busy with my mathematics research lately as I've managed to prove some pretty nice results. However things have not all been quiet on the Factor front.

Documentation for the below features is forthcoming, but for now the below is as good as it gets. You can press TAB to get a keyboard-navigatable, automatically updating, buzzword compliant completion popup:

If you press Up/Down to select a word followed by Enter, the word name is inserted in the input area. Instead you can right-click on the word to see a menu of other commands.
Now if you press C+e, you get the same popup, but instead it completes loaded source file names; again pressing Enter opens the file in your editor (if you've previously loaded a module such as contrib/jedit or contrib/emacs) and a right-click offers another option, running the file -- note that this works for loaded contrib modules too, not just core library files, and in the future there will be a more extensive integrated module browsing tool than this:

Finally, you can press C+u to get a vocabulary completer, where the default operation is to USE: the vocabulary and from the popup menu you can also browse it or IN: it -- this screenshot shows the popup menu (yes its ugly):

Some of you will remember that the Factor UI used to have popup menus, then they disappeared, then in the recent darcs release I started using the three mouse buttons to invoke different object operations, and now menus are back again. I have a hard time making my mind up on certain issues, but my code does tend to slowly converge on a preferred approach. In either case, I think its better than picking an approach and religiously sticking with it, despite observations that it may be better to do things differently.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

There is no xml there. Fails the buzzword compliance test. Sorry.

sohail

Anonymous said...

XML is so 90's. All the "academic" and non-Enterprise(tm) languages have XML parsers now, like Factor.

SOA on the other hand, is cutting edge technology you'll only find in Java and COBOL.