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:
- STEP1: user saves or more csv file(s) (or other easy-edit format) somewhere in his hard-drive
- STEP2: user creates a Windows Script Host script or a batch file (or whatever) instantiates the FilterAsYouType GUI
- STEP3: user runs the script file, and the script file instantiates the GUI, telling it which CSV file to use as the source of all potential completions
- STEP4: the user either chooses one of the completions, supplies his own text that is not in the list, or cancels out without supplying anything
- STEP5: when the user is done the script saves the result to a variable and does something with it
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.
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.