[qutebrowser] Some feelings about v1.0

[José Alberto Orejuela García]

Hello,

On Tuesday, October 17, 2017 8:40:08 PM CEST Florian Bruhin wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> On Tue, Oct 17, 2017 at 05:51:27PM +0000, José Alberto Orejuela García wrote:
> > I was very excited about qutebrowser 1.0 and now (hype is not good ever) I
> > feel disappointed about some things, mostly when interacting with commands.
> 
> Phew, I was prepared for a rant about the new config, but this at least is
> something constructive ;-)

That was the intention. I really appreciate your work and I like all the new features. =D

> > - Default behaviour for moving between completions is tab or shift-tab.
> 
> FWIW that's been the case since the completion existed.

Well, I meant that it's now the only way to do it.

> > I know that I can make arrow keys also do the job in settings, but what is
> > the point of having that disabled by default now?
> 
> Nothing is disabled - but arrow keys now navigate through command history (like
> in a shell). Previously, alt-p/alt-n did that, but nobody knew it existed.

That's a good feature, I like that reason for making the effort of getting used to that new behaviour for me (new because I'm completely used to navigate with arrows through completion).

> That being said, I had no idea how many people use arrow keys to navigate
> through the completion, and I changed it because a lot of people expected
> up/down to go through the history.

Yes, I also liked it, the point is that I didn't know it was that. Maybe you put it in the changelog and I missed that part (I usually read them), sorry. =P

> Can't please everyone I guess, but I'm tired of the bikeshedding[1] :P
> 
> [1] https://shed.bike/

I was only asking for understanding, not trying to demand anything. I'm sorry about making you feel like that.

> > - Completion is sometimes sorted differently. For example, when I wanted to
> > clear downloads, I used to write ":clear" and hit tab, the two results were
> > download-clear
> > history-clear
> > and they were alphabetically sorted. Now, the completions for that are
> > search
> > history-clear
> > download-clear
> > config-clear
> > and I cannot see what the pattern is, but it's not alphabetically in command
> > or command description, for sure. Why is this now happening?
> 
> "search" is probably included because the descriptions are now searched as
> well.

Yes, that's the case, I know, I was just wondering about the order. As you said, let's wait for rcorre comments.

> > By the way, relating completions, there are three things I have always found
> > a little annoying in qutebrowser:
> > - Not being able to go back to original. I think it could be useful to undo
> > completion, for example, writing something, hitting tab (or down arrow) and
> > then shift-tab (or up arrow). When I hit tab accidentally I have to start
> > from scratch.
> 
> While QLineEdit (which qutebrowser uses for the input) has undo functionality,
> it looks like the undo history gets cleared when setting the text
> programmatically, so qutebrowser would have to implement that by itself.
> 
> I'd rather not add more complexity just do that as this part of the code
> already is quite complex and handles various funny corner cases. Wonder what
> @rcorre thinks, though ;-)

OK, let's see. If you think that's not convenient, I trust you. =P Unfortunately, I cannot contribute to the code. I hope I'll be able somewhen.

> > - Taking into account substitutions in urls. For example, if I want to find
> > an url that contained a bang, I cannot find it using ":open !" because that
> > won't give any result as ! was changed to %21 in the url.
> 
> I have some URLs with ! and some with %21 in my completion, so I think we'd
> have to search for both - at which point this really slows down the completion,
> which I'd like to avoid ;-)

On this topic, in my opinion it's not consistent now. I can type an url with a bang and I see it at the bottom right, at the url displayed, but I have to remember that I should type %21 to find it (the problem is more about other characters, not specially !, it's just an example).

> Also, it introduces special completion matching only applicable to :open, which
> is another thing I'd like to avoid.

You could implement it everywhere, do you thing it will lead to problems with other commands?

> > - Completion until next difference: when I write ":set col" and hit tab, it'd
> > be nice if it completed to color before completing directly to
> > colors.completion.category.bg. This is certainly the feature that I see
> > hardest to being useful given a proper implementation, because normally there
> > could be a lot of partial different coincidences, for example typing
> > "duckduck" maybe it should be changed to duckduckgo based on urls or
> > DuckDuckGo based on page titles. It's also the thing I miss the least of
> > these three.
> 
> I can see how that'd be useful for settings, but again, this would introduce
> special handling for one particular completion.

Yes, I have just realised why I was thinking about that. The point is that settings were split in sections before, so I could hit tab step by step to complete, and that was (I think) what I was missing subconsciously.

Also, that led to a qute://settings page split in sections, tidier than the new one (it's a minor thing, of course). Is that intentional?

> > The other thing that disappoints me is that the browser is now significantly
> > slower. For example, when I use DDG bangs, redirections are much slower than
> > before.
> 
> On Tue, Oct 17, 2017 at 06:02:12PM +0000, Lukas Gierth wrote:
> > I also agree that the browser somehow feels slower. But i do not really
> > know why that is because the completion engine should be faster than the
> > old one.
> 
> Were you using QtWebEngine before too? If not, that might be the source of it,
> and you could try :set backend webkit (and :restart). However, using
> QtWebEngine still has various benefits over QtWebKit, especially regarding
> security.

Yes, I was, and I don't want to go back, I'm tired of crashes in qtwebkit part, hahaha. If that's the price I have to pay, I'll pay. XD

Thanks a lot for your answers. =)

José Alberto