Autocomplete for Text prompter doesn't seems to be working about inquire HOT 5 CLOSED

@fribeau v0.3.0-alpha-2 is now up :)

from inquire.

Hey @fribeau.

Actually, we don't have the tab assigned to anything on this prompt. What I believe you're seeing in the demo was that I pressed down arrow to move the cursor to the first suggestion, then the prompt auto-updated the text field to the highlighted suggestion.

You bring a very good point on usability though, the tab key is widely known as associated to auto-completion, so I think it is a usability problem for us to not use it. I'm thinking of assigning tab to either use the first suggestion in the list, if none are selected, or update text field to the current highlighted suggestion, which would basically remove other suggestions.

from inquire.

Thanks for this quick reply and for this awesome crate 😉

I also think handling tab would be really a great feature.

Regarding the tab assignment you proposing, I know that for my use case it would not work as expected. I am trying to implement a path autocomplete so I am trying to reproduce the same behavior I am getting in the terminal (with bash for example).

If I have the following directory structure and the input is /bar/f I would expect /bar/foo when the user press the tab key, but not necessary the first result (/bar/foo1).

/bar
  /foo1
  /foo2

Another approach could be:

• if only 1 suggestion remain -> complete with it
• if many -> complete with the longest prefix available

But maybe my use case it too specific

from inquire.

Yeah I think that's a little too specific for the library.

The suggestion-er behavior is implemented by the user, which means that if we hard-coded the completion process to something implementation-specific, it would break other use-cases, for example fuzzy searching and searching by substrings instead of prefixes, from the top of my mind.

What we could do instead is to have a default implementation (complete with the first option), but then provide the ability for the user to provide a hook, e.g. "auto_complete(cur_input: &str) -> String". Then you could do:

auto_complete = |cur_input| {
  // return string with longest prefix that matches input
}

Then, the prompt would call your method, get what auto-completion string and replace the current input with your completion.

There are still a few details on how to make this works seamlessly with the current "suggestion" system, but it is a direction forward :)

from inquire.

Hey @mikaelmello

I have tried several implementations trying to come up with a good solution to this problem. I finally ended up with the solution you proposed 😉 It is a good one because it is really simple so it can really be customized to the user needs.

I opened a PR to showcase this feature. You're welcome to criticize, I am completely open to suggestions.

from inquire.