Background
Lately I've become a fanatic that everything I type while working on a computer should be compatible with "DRY". If there's anything I have to type more than once in any context, I want some kind of user-aware auto-complete option to do some of the work for me -- always -- no exceptions.
Having to work under Windows, I've looked at GUI solutions to make this insane goal a reality.
The (almost) optimal solution
If you have a moment, open up Firefox 3.0 and type a few keystrokes into the address bar. You will notice that it performs a kind of Incremental Autocomplete based on space-separated sub-strings of whatever you type. Another place in Firefox that does something similar is the about:config URL.
This is sub-optimal, because I don't want this in Firefox only. I want to use this everywhere.
The Question
Does anyone out there know of a widget or app that does nothing but insanely good incremental auto-complete that can be used as a general purpose "run everywhere" tool? Something that allows the user to: 1) maintain one or more "completion candidate files"; 2) pick one of those files as the source for Firefox 3.0 style completion; 3) return the result (or blank if the user canceled), and do those three things only?
Details
Here's how it should work:
STEP1: user saves or more csv file(s) (or other easy-edit format) somewhere in his hard-drive
STEP2: user creates a Windows Script Host script or a batch file (or whatever) instantiates the FilterAsYouType GUI
STEP3: user runs the script file, and the script file instantiates the GUI, telling it which CSV file to use as the source of all potential completions
STEP4: the user either chooses one of the completions, supplies his own text that is not in the list, or cancels out without supplying anything
STEP5: when the user is done the script saves the result to a variable and does something with it
Here is some pseudo-code for the script:
include "GenericTypeaheadWidget";
var gengui = new GenericTypaheadWidget('c:\docs\favorite_foods.csv');
var fave_food = gengui.get_user_input();
if(fave_food != ''){
alert('you chose '+fave_food+'!');
}
The rationale
The goal is to just have a way to always be able to do auto-completions from a list of arbitrary items, even if the list is a couple thousand items, and not have to rely on it being built into some IDE or standalone application that only accepts certain kinds of input or has an overly-complicated API relative to the simplicity of this task.
CSV (or text or sqlite database) would provide a way for me to self-generate "candidate lists" or "history logs" and then just use those logs as the source of the possible completions.
The disclaimer
I've tried several GUI "launcher" programs, command-line engines like power-shell and scripting shells, the regular plain old command-line history with varying degrees of satisfaction. The problem with these is they all do extra superfluous stuff like searching directories or built-in commands. I just want nothing but whatever is in the CSV file I happen to be pointing at.
I'm wondering if there is any simple tool that does nothing but what I'm describing above.
UPDATE: It looks like this question is very closely related to Graphical Command Shell, which captures the essential idea presented here.
You should really try Launchy - it's exactly what you're looking for, a "run anything" with intelligent autocompletion. It completely changes the way you interact with a Windows PC.
And it has open source-code, so you can borrow its autocompletion code if you want to roll your own interface.
Related
I'm using Gvim in windows.
Normally, when we type some character then press Ctrl-n, vim will show some tag, but those tags just includes words which have been pre-typed in the current file.
Now, I need it working in a new language, and show the tag which has been defined in other files.
So, I create a new \\.ctags for this new language, and generate tags file by exuberant-ctags.
I can choose a function in current file, then press Ctrl-] to jump to the function definition, but this function was define in the other files. It is working very well.
I don't know how to make it show the tags which are generated by ctags when I type some character.
Please help me. Thanks very much.
My English is poor, I hope you can understand what I said.
CTRL-N is just the default completion (which completes from a variety of sources, including the open buffers and also the tags database). There are many more specialized completions (all starting with CTRL-X), among them tags completion, triggered via CTRL-X CTRL-], see :help i_CTRL-X_CTRL-]. If you've correctly configured the 'tags' option (so your tags database is found) and tags jumps do work, just start using that.
Some languages / filetypes also define a language-specific completion (for language keywords etc.), usually via the 'omnifunc' option and triggered by CTRL-X CTRL-O. You could write such yourself, too.
I am comfortable with vim for normal editing.
I still need to use BBEdit for a few things. Mainly multi-file search. I provide it a folder listing of XCode project and what I want to search for and it produces a listing of files that I can do down through and do whatever.
http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.21/21.02/BBEditDoesntSuck/figure3.jpg
Can I somehow do this in vim? I am using the new maximum-awesome version released by Square: https://github.com/square/maximum-awesome
Given that maximum-awesome includes the ack plugin and the silver searcher package, :Ack string is the easiest way to do this. It also includes unimpaired plugin, so you can navigate the results (in clist) using [q and ]q. :help unimpaired, :help ack.
Don't use that silly distribution, it may feel like a convenient shortcut at first but it will slow you down. Configuring Vim and installing plugins yourself according to your needs is a large part of the learning experience. Skip that part and you'll be hooked to plugins and to someone else's tastes without getting the chance to actually learn to use Vim.
Case in point:
Vim does exactly what you want without plugins.
:vim foo **/*.m | cw
searches for foo in every *.m file under the working directory and opens the quickfix window if matches are found.
See :help file-searching and :h :vim grep.
You have installed a distribution that comes with 35 plugins without even reviewing them and deciding if they are worth installing or not or even actually read up on what they do. One of those plugins, Ack.vim, is there specifically to provide a streamlined (and fast) project-wide search experience. You should read its documentation, :help ack.
And, maybe, try the standard method before you get too used to Ack.vim.
You can use vimg for multi file search.
vimg /search string/ **
** makes it recursive for all file types
**/**.java if you want to search recursively for all java files
* if you want to search current working directory only
copen to open search results
cnext to see next match
cprev to see prev match
cclose to close search results
I am currently developing some functionality that implements some complex calculations. The calculations themselves are explained and defined in Word documents.
What I would like to do is create a hyperlink in each code file that references the assocciated Word document - just as you can in Word itself. Ideally this link would be placed in or near the XML comments for each class.
The files reside on a network share and there are no permissions to worry about.
So far I have the following but it always comes up with a file not found error.
file:///\\165.195.209.3\engdisk1\My Tool\Calculations\111-07 MyToolCalcOne.docx
I've worked out the problem is due to the spaces in the folder and filenames.
My Tool
111-07 MyToolCalcOne.docx
I tried replacing the spaces with %20, thus:
file:///\\165.195.209.3\engdisk1\My%20Tool\Calculations\111-07%20MyToolCalcOne.docx
but with no success.
So the question is; what can I use in place of the spaces?
Or, is there a better way?
One way that works beautifully is to write your own URL handler. It's absolutely trivial to do, but so very powerful and useful.
A registry key can be set to make the OS execute a program of your choice when the registered URL is launched, with the URL text being passed in as a command-line argument. It just takes a few trivial lines of code to will parse the URL in any way you see fit in order to locate and launch the documentation.
The advantages of this:
You can use a much more compact and readable form, e.g. mydocs://MyToolCalcOne.docx
A simplified format means no trouble trying to encode tricky file paths
Your program can search anywhere you like for the file, making the document storage totally portable and relocatable (e.g. you could move your docs into source control or onto a website and just tweak your URL handler to locate the files)
Your URL is unique, so you can differentiate files, web URLs, and documentation URLs
You can register many URLs, so can use different ones for specs, designs, API documentation, etc.
You have complete control over how the document is presented (does it launch Word, an Internet Explorer, or a custom viewer to display the docs, for example?)
I would advise against using spaces in filenames and URLs - spaces have never worked properly under Windows, and always cause problems (or require ugliness like %20) sooner or later. The easiest and cleanest solution is simply to remove the spaces or replace them with something like underscores, dashes or periods.
In general how does one test a various parts of a GUI? What are good practices? (Yes I am being overly general here).
Let take for Notepad's Find dialog box:
Notepad's Find dialog box http://img697.imageshack.us/img697/5483/imgp.png
What are some things that can be tested? How does one know its working correctly? What are edge cases to look out for? Stress tests?
Here.
I doubt any good generalization can be made about this - it always depends on the situation.
When someone asks for tests for GUI I always assume that that mean 'this part of application that is accessible via this GUI'. Otherwise it would mean testing the only the GUI without any logic hooked. Dunno why no one never actually asked for testing if the events are fired when button is pressed or is displayed window acquiring focus.
Anyway back to the question. First of all find out about equivalence classes, boundary conditions other testing techniques. Than try to apply it for given problem. Than try to be creative.
All those should be applied when creating following tests:
1) happy path tests - application acts right when given input is good
2) negative tests - application acts right when given input is bad
3) psychotic user behavior (I saw someone use this term, and I find it to be great) - that one user that has nothing better to do than break your application or is to stupid to actually know how bad and horrible things he is doing with your app.
After all this if all tests are passing and you can't figure out other, than you don't know is it working properly, but you can say that it passed all tests and it seems to be working correctly.
As for given GUI example.
1)
Is the application finding string that is in opened file?
Is the application finding character that is in opened file?
How is it reacting to reaching end of file during search?
Is it finding other appearances of given string/character or just one, when there are many of those appearances ?
Is it handling special search characters like * or ? correctly?
Is it searching in desired direction?
Is it 'Mach case ' option working properly?
When opening find setting some criteria, canceling search and launching it again - are search criteria back to default values? Or are they set as you left them when clicking Cancel?
2)
Is it informing user that no mach was found when trying to search for data that is not in opened file?
Is it reacting properly when trying to search down form end of file?
Is it reacting properly when trying to search up form beginning of file?
How search feature is reacting when no file is loaded? (in MS notepad it can be done, but in other editors you can launch editor without opening a file hence this test)
Can I mark both Up and Downs search direction?
3)
Is it working properly on 4GB file?
Can I load 4 GB string in 'Find What:' field and search for it?
Can I provide as input special characters by providing ASCII codes? (it was done like pressing Alt and number of character... or something like that)
Can I search for empty character (there was something like that in character table).
Can I search for characters like end of line or CarretReturn?
Will it search for characters form different languages? (Chinese, or other non-english alphabet characters)
Can I inject something like ') DROP ALL TABLES; (if that would be web based search).
Will I be able to launch proper event twice by really fast double click on search button? (easier on web apps)
With reasonable test suite you know it seems to work correctly.
I think it is better to separate out functional aspects and the usability aspects for the GUI testing.
Let us say in the above example take the use case of user entering some text and hitting the Find button. From the functional aspect I would say your tests should check whether this user action (event) calls the appropriate event handler methods. These can be automated if your code has good separation between the GUI display code and the
functional part.
Testing of usability aspect would involve checking things like whether the display occurs correctly in multiple platforms. I think this needs to be verified manually. But I think there are some tools that automate this kind of GUI testing as well but I've no experience with them.
It's difficult and error-prone to test finished UIs.
But if you are more interested form the programmer's perspective, please have a read of the paper The Humble Dialog. It presents an architecture for creating UIs whose functionality can be tested in code using standard testing frameworks.
I have to build a GUI application on Windows Mobile, and would like it to be able user to choose the language she wants, or application to choose the language automatically. I consider using multiple dlls containing just required resources.
1) What is the preferred (default?) way to get the application choose the proper resource language automatically, without user intervention? Any samples?
2) What are my options to allow user / application control what language should it display?
3) If possible, how do I create a dll that would contain multiple language resources and then dynamically choose the language?
For #1, you can use the GetSystemDefaultLangID function to get the language identifier for the machine.
For #2, you could list languages you support and when the user selects one, write the selection into a text file or registry (is there a registry on Windows Mobile?). On startup, use the function in #1 only if there is no selection in the file or registry.
For #3, the way we do it is to have one resource DLL per language, each of which contains the same resource IDs. Once you figure out the language, load the DLL for that language and the rest just works.
Re 1: The previous GetSystemDefuaultLangID suggestion is a good one.
Re 2: You can ask as a first step in your installation. Or you can package different installers for each language.
Re 3:
In theory the DLL method mentioned above sounds great, however in practice it didn't work very well at all for me personally.
A better method is to surround all of the strings in your program with either: Localize or NoLocalize.
MessageBox(Localize("Hello"), Localize("Title"), MB_OK);
RegOpenKey(NoLocalize("\\SOFTWARE\\RegKey"), ...);
Localize is just a function that converts your english text to a the selected language. NoLocalize does nothing.
You want to surround your strings with these values though because you can build a couple of useful scripts in your scripting language of choice.
1) A script that searches for all the Localize(" prefixes and outputs a .ini file with english=otherlangauge name value pairs. If the output .ini file already contains a mapping you don't add it again. You never re-create the ini file completely, your script just adds the missing ones each time you run your script.
2) A script that searches all the strings and makes sure they are surrounded by either Localize(" or NoLocalize(". If not it tells you which strings you still need to localize.
The reason #2 is important is because you need to make sure all of your strings are actually consciously marked as needing localization or not. Otherwise it is absolutely impossible to make sure you have proper localization.
The reason for #1 instead of loading from a DLL is because it takes no work to maintain this solution and you can add new strings that need to be translated on the fly.
You ship the ini files that are output with your program. You also give these ini files to your translators so they can convert the english=otherlanguage pairs. When they send it back to you, you simply replace your checked in .ini file with the one given by your translator. Running your script as mentioned in #1 will re-add any missing translations if any were done while the translator was translating.