[Gretl-devel] Re: annoying buggy behavior of editor's auto-completion
On Fri, 4 Dec 2020, Sven Schreiber wrote:
Am 03.12.2020 um 23:02 schrieb Allin Cottrell:
> On Thu, 3 Dec 2020, Sven Schreiber wrote:
>> This is a quite distracting PITA. Is this a GTK problem? An obvious
>> workaround is to switch off auto-completion, or get used to typing a
>> superfluous space at the end before the return.
>
> This "service" is provided by gtksourceview. It seems to work not too
> badly with gtksourceview-3.0 (companion of GtK 3) but on Linux using
> Gtk 2 + gtksourceview-2.0 I can replicate the broken behaviour you
> describe. (Regardless of further problems, it's already broken to
> offer "series" as a completion of "da".)
>
> I suppose we need to either backport a fix from gtksourceview-3.0, if
> possible, or remove the autocompletion option for gretl builds that
> use Gtk 2.
I don't think it's worth the effort to do a backport - also perhaps
someday even the Windows build might use Gtk 3.
Some day, but in the meantime I think it's worth trying to fix the
broken "proposal" mechanism whereby typing "da" results in a
proposal of "series". I have a promising-looking candidate fix,
though it needs more testing.
> I can't say I find this facility very useful even in Gtk 3:
it has no
> notion of hansl context and just works with a flat list of previously
> typed words.
Well yes, it could work better. (Remember also the other problem that
keyboard shortcuts to select among several proposals don't seem to
work.) But if you have a bunch of longer identifiers it's still useful
and avoids typos I'd say.
OK, we'll not give up on it. Plus, I think -- though it's difficult
to tell since the API is under-documened -- it should be possible to
offer completion on hansl function-names (commands too, if wanted).
Allin