[haiku-development] Re: Yet another Task for GSoC: HUD
- From: "Jürgen Wall" <x-otic@xxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2012 07:59:49 +0100
> >> This feature provably makes absolutely no sense at all, if it were
> >> just based on menu item names with some scripting to extract them from
> >> the running application.
> >
> > Ok, I agree to some extend. If one wants to find something like
> > 'settings' , 'properties' or 'options' of an application in the simple
> > scenario one would have to type it in exactly,
> > however there could also be sets of related words, such that by typing
> > 'settings' for example the search would come up with match of 'options'.
> > And, those sets won't have to application specific in most cases since
> > common wording is used mostly, right?
> > That means a global database containing sets of words with similar
> > meaning could drive this search well.
>
> The more complex the application, the more interesting this feature
> would be. But the global database would probably be less and less
> helpful, the more complex the application gets.
The more complex the application gets, the more specific words it would use,
which might not be part of the database at that time. One way to deal with that
is to extend the database over time. OTOH if there are no alternatives for
those specific terms you are likely to enter the exact word in the search.
Furthermore, wildcards (or even reg-exp) could be allowed to match words the
user doesn't want or doesn't know how to spell correctly.
> Also, just imagine that when you highlight or hover a search result,
> some info text would be shown (perhaps that very same programmatically
> declared one) in a dedicated space. How helpful would that be to explore
> and discover an app?
Don't know if I got the point here. In the simplest form the search result list
would tell you the path in the menu system annotated with the shortcuts you
need to get to the 'command' matched. e.g.:
Edit [ALT+E] -> Object [ALT+J] -> Layout [ALT+Y] -> Align Left [ALT+N]
or the list could have two lines per item, the upper one for the menu path and
the lower one for the shortcut sequence.
Now, if we made the shortcuts searchable too and the user enters 'ALT+' in the
search box, he would see a list of shortcuts of the program at a glance, which
would help him learn the shortcuts.
> It would be sort of a combination of finding menu
> items (or lets call them commands) combined with a standard way to
> declare these commands programmatically with short documentation.
This is something a GSoC student could try to find an elegant solution for.
Regards,
Juergen
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