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Firefox
by Michael on Tuesday 15/Apr/2008, @12:17

What makes IMHO Firefox great is the fact that they introduce new features which are useful instantly without much learning, installing extensions whatever and which don't clutter the interface or menus at all. In Firefox3 for example I can use the address bar for searching page titles in my history. No new control elements, no scripts, plugins, extensions - whatever. An existing feature made better. I'm sometimes missing this kind of innovation in various applications, including Kate. Some ideas:

* Better look/grouping of open file list. Perhaps with headings for each server, spacing, sorting etc.
* Intelligent editing functions working in the background like: If I modify a variable name two or three times let there be a non-obstrusive bar at the bottom (like the new find bar) saying: Click here to replace this name in the whole function/Click here to replace this name in the whole document.
* Additional information popups reminding you of the number/order of parameters in user-defined (all currently open documents) as well as native functions. Option to go to say php.net/strpos for reference or to jump to declaration of user-defined functions
* Automatically detecting if there are two similar looking documents currently open and being able to start KCompare

Nevertheless, Kate is already great without all those features. Big thanks to all the developers!

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Re: Firefox
by alsuren on Tuesday 15/Apr/2008, @16:15

I think that most of your points require some quite subtle inference to get right, and it's really not in the scope of a text editor to do these kinds of things (I think we all agree that the office helper is very annoying).

This kind of application is a possible future use of nepomuk, and should really be a separate application. What would be interesting is if we had a "What Next?" applet in the panel or somewhere that always highlighted the actions that we're likely to want to do next. It would need to be un-obtrusive, and have some statistical inference/machine learning going on behind the scenes to make sure that it is useful rather than annoying.

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Re: Firefox
by Michael on Wednesday 16/Apr/2008, @00:29

The office helper is only annoying because 99% of the time it guesses wrong what you want to do. And it's annoying because it hides important information on screen. I propose a bar like the popup suppression bar in Firefox which doesnt hide anything and I think that a programming language is much simpler than a real language so there are some reasonable guesses you can make. In fact, text completion is already such a feature and not less obtrusive than what I proposed. Additional, you can always disable a specific feature. The problem with clippy is that it isn't really clear in what situations it will help you at all. You can only enable or disable it completely. And when you enter a question in natural language it cannot find most of the time a good answer because computers can't do that correctly anyway as we all know. One of the worst ideas Microsoft ever had...

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