[qutebrowser] Some feelings about v1.0

Ryan Roden-Corrent ryan at rcorre.net
Wed Oct 18 13:57:44 CEST 2017


Hi José!

Thanks for the great email, there's lots of clear, constructive feedback here.

> Default behaviour for moving between completions is tab or shift-tab. 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? 

I think Florian addressed this one -- up/down are used for history, leaving just
tab/shift-tab for completion selection. I think this mirrors what people are
used to from a shell.

I find I use tab for completion, alt-p/n for history, and never touch those
annoying arrow keys :)

> 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?

I'm calling this a bug. They are sorted initially but we lose sorting when you
filter. I created https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/3156 to
track.

> 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.

How about <ctrl+w> to delete the last word?

> 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.

This depends on how you got to the url. If I navigate to example.com/foo!bar,
that exact string will show up in my completions, and will show up with 
":open !". If I navigate explicitly to example.com/foo%21bar, then we will not
automatically decode it. I think maybe we could with QURL.FullyDecoded? If so,
do we want to? Florian?

> 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. 

So something like vim's completeopt=longest? That is, complete the longest
substring of the available completions? I could see this being useful for things
like settings. It seems nearly useless for URL's though. I almost never type
`:open http://`, but without that, you wouldn't be matching anything by a prefix
plus you'd miss out on https://, ect. I'm not sure I'd want to implement
different completion behaviors for different completion types, but it isn't a
bad suggestion.

> 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.

I was one of the ones who pushed for this change. I could never seem to remember
what section a given option belonged in. Is "User-Agent" general or network?
What about "private-browsing"? I frequently had to try several sections. Now I
just type ":set user_agent" and it completes to "content.headers.user_agent".

> Overall, I'm not feeling bad about the update and I'd like to thank
> Florian and all the contributors for all the work you've done. =)

Thank YOU for writing this email. We can't fix things we don't know about :)

- Ryan (rcorre)

On Wed 10/18/17 06:32AM, Florian Bruhin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Tue, Oct 17, 2017 at 08:39:38PM +0000, José Alberto Orejuela García wrote:
> > > 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
> 
> I did indeed forget to put it in the original changelog and then added it a bit
> later, so that might be me to blame ;-)
> 
> FWIW, there is a more detailed explanation here:
> https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/blob/master/doc/help/configuring.asciidoc#migrating-older-configurations
> 
> > > 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.
> 
> Sorry, that was poorly worded on my part, I wasn't blaming you. That was more
> of a general statement.
> 
> > > 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?
> 
> Yes - if you filter for ! in e.g. the setting value completion or whatever, you
> wouldn't expect qutebrowser to filter for %21.
> 
> > > > - 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?
> 
> Kind of - sections just don't exist anymore, because they made both the code
> and using :set (as you needed to know what section something was in) more
> complicated.
> 
> That does indeed mean qute://settings is a bit less organized now, but I'm not
> sure what to do about that.
> 
> Florian
> 
> -- 
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