Hi Dan,
> I don't think that having suggested commands or an autocompletion feature would really change
> the overall workflow at all, though.
There are probably cases where it would... The main focus for that input field in MoI is for typing in x,y,z point values. One of the things you can type in is relative coordinates like if you're drawing a line you can type in r5,6 for the second point to place it at x+5, y+6 from the start point. With an autocomplete popup for command names running, there would probably be some kind of hiccup and a menu popping out when someone tried to do that.
That type of thing makes me think that it would probably work better to have a separate control for typing in command names, something that you could optionally make appear on the side pane and then when you typed into that control since it was focused just on typing in command names and not on other things like x,y,z inputs it would be easier for it to go "hog wild" with various fancy stuff like an autocomplete list when you started typing into it.
> Besides, aren't there some commands that don't actually have a button in the GUI associated with them,
> and you have to know what they are beforehand? (Correct me if I'm wrong.)
There are but I consider that to be a hopefully temporary design flaw. I would like to expose those things on the GUI in some kind of "advanced tools" dropdown somewhere.
Certainly I wouldn't want to use a current design flaw for reasoning about how to implement something... One of the pretty fundamental design philosophies behind MoI is that I'd rather leave something hanging or just not implemented yet if there isn't a pretty clear way on how it integrates with the whole. The reason why is that once you just start sticking on features just to have more features they end up getting stuck on in awkward ways and pretty soon you've got scores or even hundreds of features which make things weird for new users and you can't remove any of them because each one is someone's favorite thing... That's basically how things get bloated and complex over time and I'm very focused on avoiding that with MoI.
Anyway like I mentioned before I could see in the future having some optional plug-in that would give you the autocomplete behavior that you were asking for - so don't get me wrong I'm not saying that it will never happen. Just that it probably won't be part of the default setup.
> <...> An autocompletion feature would help the user discover those hidden commands.
Well like you mentioned later on, nobody really would know from the beginning that you can type in command names in the XYZ input box anyway, so it doesn't really help much with command discovery for the vast majority of cases...
But imagine if you could go into a "Script library browser", and go to a section like "Command handling", and there was an entry in there for "Command line entry with autocomplete", and you could hit a checkbox on there and then a field would appear in the side pane and you could then type in names there with the dropdown. That would actually have a chance at being discoverable by someone who was really interested in typing in command names.
- Michael
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