4 ms·

One rule I always consider important: > If I type the next letter of the top match, it should remain the top match. I find these types of inductive rules migh

by ghayes 8y ago

One rule I always consider important: > If I type the next letter of the top match, it should remain the top match. I find these types of inductive rules might be a better way to express how autocomplete should work (given a limited universe of suggestions).

cstrat 8y ago
> If I type the next letter of the top match, it should remain the top match. How would this not always be the case anyway given the other rules in place?
- pests 8y ago
  Agreed. Even then its hard to even define the next letter. With sub-sequence matching something like "gsl" might be displayed as "[g]et[D]isplay[L]ist" with items in brackets highlighted. No real next letter in this case.
- pfranz 8y ago
  You're right in that this example violates, "When one option is the prefix of another, put the shortest one first." But a personal peeve of mine is Apple Spotlight. When I type d-a-s it autocompletes to dash.app, as soon as I type d-a-s-h it autocompletes to dashboard.app. Since it's built-in I felt limited in what I could do about it. Thanks to this post I looked up how to suppress it from Spotlight since I dont use Dashboard.
  - sojournerc 8y ago
    you might like this - https://www.alfredapp.com/ https://www.alfredapp.com/ - replaces spotlight, is faster, and fuzzy search seems better
    - pfranz 8y ago
      I'll check it out again. I only use the most basic functionality of launching apps (I stretched out and started using the calculator a few months ago!). Years ago I looked at what was out there and used Quicksilver, but as soon as Spotlight started working for launching apps I stopped looking for anything else. I can't imagine anything faster than Spotlight other than the few times where it's reindexing.
hnra 8y ago
This is one of my pet peeves in Visual Studio Code. If you type a language keyword it put it on top of the suggestion list. So "de" might suggest "defaultdict" but if I add an "f" and auto complete it gives me a function template.
drtz 8y ago
Mac Spotlight Search doesn't follow this rule and it's sooooo annoying. I have Firefox and Firefox Developer Edition both installed and the top search suggestion seems to randomly switch back and forth between the two depending on how many letters of "firefox" I type. Trying to switch to 1Password is somehow even more irritating. Typing "1p" reasonably suggests 1Password. If I continue typing "1pa", however, I'm given the hilariously unrelated knowledge that 1 Pascal is equal to 0.0075 Torrs. Pressing return then takes me a Google search (in Safari, which isn't even my default browser) for "1pa" which gives me yet another pressure unit conversion, 1 Pa = 1e-5 bar.
- 0xffff2 8y ago
  The Windows 10 start menu does the same thing. As I type "Visual Studio", the selection changes seemingly at random between Visual Studio, VSCode and the Visual Studio Installer. Infuriatingly, it seems to prefer the installer, which is never the one I want and AFAIK it's not possible to remove an item from the search results without uninstalling the application completely.
marcosdumay 8y ago
Matches should monotonically disappear and not get reordered as you enter more letters. This is trivial to do on exact contexts (like start menus - why none gets this?). It's ok to wait until the user enters some letters to start showing options, it's also ok to limit the number of results as long as you say there are more somewhere. What is not ok is to show a single match, and then after the user press another key show two matches, with the first one gone. Distance based matching can't strictly follow this rule, but if you are optimizing one, it is a good goal to get approximately right.

by ghayes 8y ago

cstrat 8y ago

> If I type the next letter of the top match, it should remain the top match. How would this not always be the case anyway given the other rules in place?

pests 8y ago
Agreed. Even then its hard to even define the next letter. With sub-sequence matching something like "gsl" might be displayed as "[g]et[D]isplay[L]ist" with items in brackets highlighted. No real next letter in this case.
pfranz 8y ago
You're right in that this example violates, "When one option is the prefix of another, put the shortest one first." But a personal peeve of mine is Apple Spotlight. When I type d-a-s it autocompletes to dash.app, as soon as I type d-a-s-h it autocompletes to dashboard.app. Since it's built-in I felt limited in what I could do about it. Thanks to this post I looked up how to suppress it from Spotlight since I dont use Dashboard.
- sojournerc 8y ago
  you might like this - https://www.alfredapp.com/ https://www.alfredapp.com/ - replaces spotlight, is faster, and fuzzy search seems better
  - pfranz 8y ago
    I'll check it out again. I only use the most basic functionality of launching apps (I stretched out and started using the calculator a few months ago!). Years ago I looked at what was out there and used Quicksilver, but as soon as Spotlight started working for launching apps I stopped looking for anything else. I can't imagine anything faster than Spotlight other than the few times where it's reindexing.

hnra 8y ago

This is one of my pet peeves in Visual Studio Code. If you type a language keyword it put it on top of the suggestion list. So "de" might suggest "defaultdict" but if I add an "f" and auto complete it gives me a function template.

drtz 8y ago

Mac Spotlight Search doesn't follow this rule and it's sooooo annoying. I have Firefox and Firefox Developer Edition both installed and the top search suggestion seems to randomly switch back and forth between the two depending on how many letters of "firefox" I type. Trying to switch to 1Password is somehow even more irritating. Typing "1p" reasonably suggests 1Password. If I continue typing "1pa", however, I'm given the hilariously unrelated knowledge that 1 Pascal is equal to 0.0075 Torrs. Pressing return then takes me a Google search (in Safari, which isn't even my default browser) for "1pa" which gives me yet another pressure unit conversion, 1 Pa = 1e-5 bar.

0xffff2 8y ago
The Windows 10 start menu does the same thing. As I type "Visual Studio", the selection changes seemingly at random between Visual Studio, VSCode and the Visual Studio Installer. Infuriatingly, it seems to prefer the installer, which is never the one I want and AFAIK it's not possible to remove an item from the search results without uninstalling the application completely.

marcosdumay 8y ago

Matches should monotonically disappear and not get reordered as you enter more letters. This is trivial to do on exact contexts (like start menus - why none gets this?). It's ok to wait until the user enters some letters to start showing options, it's also ok to limit the number of results as long as you say there are more somewhere. What is not ok is to show a single match, and then after the user press another key show two matches, with the first one gone. Distance based matching can't strictly follow this rule, but if you are optimizing one, it is a good goal to get approximately right.