CODEWITHSUNDEEP
user-interfaceautocompletefiltering
dreftymac
dreftymac

Reputation: 32410

General Purpose Filter As You Type (aka typeahead, Incremental find, autocomplete) is it out there?

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:

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.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1153

Answers (1)

Eli Bendersky
Eli Bendersky

Reputation: 273656

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.

Upvotes: 1

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