JADE Environment Development Ideas

John Richards 29/03/2018 2:27:51 PM
Additional options will be available in 2018.

Software Medical Infomatics Limited 28/02/2018 10:44:03 AM
@Brian, I used to be quite verbose with variable naming but I'm now trying to make methods shorter and using concise variable names in short methods makes a lot of sense.

@Ty point taken about making suggestions for improvements. Although most other IDEs and code editors seem to get this right so just making Jade work the same as most others in the industry would be a good first step.

Brian Johnstone 27/02/2018 4:52:35 PM
I now understand why I don't get as frustrated as some of you with the Jade autocomplete. It's because I'd never use 'e' or 'sm' or 'smDict' as my local variable or parameter names. I tend to be quite verbose with my variable names so that their exact usage/meaning is clear without looking at usage context. But, as others have said using exact matches when they occur, or noting when we correct a 'prior' suggestion and updating the 'history' for the next autocomplete suggestion would definitely be useful.

Ty Baen-Price 14/02/2018 4:21:02 PM
I will point out that saying something is bad is not a suggestion on how to improve the product. Parsys is still for bugs, JEDI is where you say "I think it would be better if you did [x]" where x!= "not annoy me". I agree with James that some degree of sorting by category would be useful. You could spend a long time arguing over which categories to prioritise (nearest scope, bluest, etc), but ultimately, it may need to be configurable. The way it currently works is definitely not geared towards users of single-character variable names, because (in current releases) it preselects what you chose last time (and your single variable will be at the top of a long list which you're in the middle of).

FileVision UK Ltd 10/02/2018 8:56:51 AM
Now that I understand how it works, what I find unintuitive is that the history doesn't update when it gives me an incorrect suggestion because I correct the word in the editor rather than choosing the correct suggestion.

For example if I type "e" and it autocompleted "endif", by the time I notice it's wrong I've already typed "." so I get "endif." and I fix it by highlighting "endif" and replacing it with "e", but the history system doesn't know that I was correcting its suggestion, so next time I type "e" it will autocomplete to "endif" again.

Software Medical Infomatics Limited 31/01/2018 11:55:20 AM
Having experimented with this a bit more, code-completion would be considerably less annoying if typing a dot did an exact match on what had already been typed. Unfortunately it doesn't do this at present.

In another example, I have local vars sm, and smDict. When I type sm. the code completion replaces my sm. with smDict.

James Burnby 30/01/2018 8:20:48 AM
Perhaps auto-completion will work better if it prioritised by position? e.g. Current method, then current class, classes up the tree, accessible items in the current schema, accessible items in the schemas up the tree etc?

Brian Johnstone 26/01/2018 8:25:19 AM
Interestingly I've found that 99.9% of the time the Jade auto-complete works better than the equivalent features in other IDEs I've used because of the history feature. But it would be nice if there was an exact match for what you've typed if it went for that instead.

FileVision UK Ltd 26/01/2018 6:10:26 AM
I reported this as a bug (#65638) - apparently it's autocompleting based on history to help you enter the things you type most often. They've resolved this (in the 2018 version) by adding a preference for whether to use history or just match alphabetically.