GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 343996
Please include autocompletion
Last modified: 2017-07-31 12:38:36 UTC
It would be great if Tomboy would autocomplete words that meet existing notes, just like Gnome's run menu does for example. I mean, if I have a note called "wishlist for edgy eft" and I type "wis" (3 first characters) on a different note, "hlist for edgy eft" would appear as highlighted text and be confirmed at the press of the Enter key. That would make the use of Tomboy much more efficient, specially since often I don't know what my notes are called or even if there's already an existing not related to what I'm writing. Thanks in advance.
Completion doesn't really help if you can't remember what a note is called, or if a similar one already exists. It only helps if you know the beginning of the name of the note, and don't want to type the rest. And even then it only really works if you use a personal taxonomy of some sort, like instead of "wishlist for edgy eft" you use "edgy eft wishlist". Probably a more useful approach is to use a hovering window to list notes, and let you choose one, similar to code completion in many IDEs. But I think this is too intrusive in a note taking program. Emacs-style cycling through an autocomplete ring is a possibility, but this requires an obscure keybinding to do the cycling (Ctrl-/). That said, I think it's a useful feature, and one I would like to see in Tomboy. I just can't figure out how t make it useable and friendly.
Another alternative to code completion that I use all the time is to select some text that you think has a related note, and hit Ctrl-F for Search. This will start a search for the selected text. You can find note names pretty quickly this way.
"Completion doesn't really help if you can't remember what a note is called, or if a similar one already exists". Let's suppose I have a note called "wishlist for edgy eft" and another called "wishlist for dapper drake". In an ideal world when I typed "wis", "hlist for " would appear. I would hit enter and "wishlist for " would be confirmed. Then, I would just have to type "e" for "edgy eft" to appear or "d" for "dapper drake". Dead easy, I think, compared to the present method where you have to remember every single word, isn't it? "And even then it only really works if you use a personal taxonomy of some sort, like instead of "wishlist for edgy eft" you use "edgy eft wishlist". A possible solution for this would be for autocompletion to look for every single word in the note's title, as opposed to just the first word. So, "wishlist for edgy eft" would appear if I typed "wis", "edg" or "eft". I have no idea of how hard this would be to implement, though, so maybe I'm just talking nonsense. Even without this feature, I think autocompletion would be far more useful than the present behavior. "Probably a more useful approach is to use a hovering window to list notes"... "I think this is too intrusive in a note taking program" I think so, my main point is to offer further fuctionality while keeping it simple and this is too complex for my taste. "and hit Ctrl-F for Search. This will start a search for the selected text. You can find note names pretty quickly this way". Yeah but one of the main points of autocompletion is that it would remind you of related notes that you might not even know were there. Plus, it's faster IMO.
*** Bug 172924 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Any work being done on this?
Nope, I don't think anyone has taken ownership of this yet.
Setting the default assignee and QA Contact to "tomboy-maint@gnome.bugs".
I like the idea of autocompletion. I am thinking of a "complete my incorrect/incomplete link" feature : "wishlist for edgy eft" should be offered when typing "wsihlist ofr egdy e". I am thinking of using Beagle library/code/deamon. But perhaps adding a simple SearchApproximate function would do it. I don't know what would be the best idea.
I would like to try my hands on this :-)
The Tomboy team has moved from GNOME Bugzilla to GitHub for bug reports and feature requests: https://github.com/tomboy-notes/tomboy/issues/ Closing this report as NOTGNOME as part of Bugzilla Housekeeping (bug 781054) to keep tasks in one place. Please feel free to transfer this task to GitHub if this task is still valid in a recent Tomboy version. We are sorry for the inconvenience.