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hameluck
Starting Member

USA
1 Posts

Posted - Jun 13 2006 :  2:53:19 PM  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
Call me old fashioned, but I love editors like vi which operate in two modes, editing and command. I dislike having to move my right hand out of position to use the cursor keys. I have to develop in Visual Studio and ViEmu, http://www.viemu.com/, is indispensible to me.

Trouble is, I also find Visual Assist X indispensible but the two together create a few annoyances. Most of the annoyances could probably be solved in a few ways, although I don't have any idea how editor extensions like Visual Assist X and ViEmu get executed... Is there a definitive order that each get to look at the keypresses made before they show up in the editor, for example.

One of the major annoyances is when ViEmu is in command mode. In command mode the keystrokes are for navigation only but Visual Assist X will happily keep on suggesting stuff I will never want. If there was a way for ViEmu to inform Visual Assist X, or for ViEmu to just toggle off suggestions when it is in command mode I think that would solve a lot of the annoyances. Whether that's possible or not, I don't know.

If that's not possible I think some small changes to how 'Autotext' works in Visual Assist X could go a long way to solving these problems. If an Autotext entry could be set to override any other suggestions that might come from header parsing and if an Autotext entry could be just set to do nothing (that kind of works now, if the Autotext entry is empty but exists that seems to more or less behave the way I want). I see that Autotext can be excluded from suggestions but it would be nice if a specific autotext entry could just completely override I think things would work well. That way the common vi navigation keys and command -> entry keys could be set up.
i.e. h, j, k, l, A, i, I, o, etc...

I don't know about others but for me it seems to be exceptionally rare for a single character typed in to come up with a good list of what I actually want. Again, because of the keyboard navigation issues and my dislike of the arrow keys, I prefer to type until the thing I actually want becomes disambiguated rather than moving my hand over to the arrow keys to scroll and select the one I want. For me, excluding a lot of single characters from suggestions would be no handicap whatsoever.

That said, perhaps even a better solution would be to have a setting in Visual Assist X that set a minimum number of characters before a suggestion box would kick in.

Another annoyance is Visual Assist X eats the escape that gets rid of an unwanted list box.

It appears that the author of ViEmu also uses Visual Assist X from postings on his forum and is aware of these interaction issues but he's trying to solve it completely on his end but that's not getting very far.

Anyway, thanks for listening!

feline
Whole Tomato Software

United Kingdom
19020 Posts

Posted - Jun 13 2006 :  4:48:00 PM  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
the problem you have is that both plugin's are hooking into the IDE, without the IDE's knowledge, and are getting in each others way.

as someone who still uses VIM regularly for many editing tasks you do have my sympathies, although i cannot quite get my head around how i would use VIM commands in the middle of the IDE, they seem to have quite different modes of working.

what effect are you getting with empty autotext entries? you speak as if this was almost working. certainly autotext is supposed to take presidence over other list boxes.

as for single letter suggestions, this does work correctly for me some of the time, mainly for recently used variables that i am reusing, especially when suggestion listboxes appear.

zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness

Edited by - feline on Jun 13 2006 4:49:51 PM
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Whole Tomato Software

5566 Posts

Posted - Jun 14 2006 :  11:54:39 AM  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
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