GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 345800
Modify a completation
Last modified: 2011-07-10 02:24:15 UTC
When you type something a list of possible completations appear, sometimes there's no exact match, but close (for example, I type goo and Browse http://google.com/ appeared, but in fact, I wanted http://google.com/adsense). It would be nice if there was a way to copy that completation to the textbox to continue refining it (without having to type everything). My first try was to press the right arrow. Here I can think of two possible behaviours. The left arrow jumps to the end of the particular completation or just completes one more letter, so, having type "goo" and picking up "Browse http://google.com" and presing right arrow three times and typing "rs.com" would take me to http://googlers.com. Thank you, the applet is awesome... I am becoming totally adicted to it.
I really like the idea. It is not straight forward with the current handler API i think though. When you get a hit for "http://google.com/" there's no way for outsiders (the applet) to know what exact phrase triggered the hit. It only knows the text to display ("Browse http://google.com/") and a method to call when the match is triggered (Match.action()) Maybe the Match.name variable can be used for this, but I don't think we have any standardization on this. If we agree on this I guess it is possible to tweak all handlers to make Match.name be the string that triggered the match. Then we can call it a standard afterwards :-) - and implement this cool idea? We need to talk about this before we charge ahead though - and mind we have other important features yet to be implemented before 2.16...
I also like this idea, especially when using the deskbar to execute programs. Sometimes an application stops responding and I use the deskbar for "killall amarokapp" for example. After typing "kil" all entries in the history are beginning with "Execute killall". I would suggest that pressing the tab-key completes the string as far as possible. In my case it would be "killall " (with the trailing space) with "killall amarokapp" and "killall firefox-bin" being in the history. Now typing "a<TAB><ENTER>" should finish it off killing amarok.
In addition, I suggest that as you select each command in turn, the search box should be populated appropriately for that command. You press down arrow until you reach "http://google.com/", and then you type "adsense", to produce the search string "http://google.com/adsense".
deskbar-applet development has been stalled [1]. Maintainers don't have future development plan so i am closing the bugs as WONTFIX. [1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2011-June/msg00073.html