Feature Request: Enhance Show/Search All Commands

[jkwuc89]

My apologies if this has been requested already...

IntelliJ IDEA and Visual Studio Code both have a feature, invoked by an easy to remember keyboard shortcut, that displays a search window where one can find and execute any editor command. The list of commands shown automatically updates as the search string is entered. In Visual Studio Code, the most recently used command is shown at the top of the list. In both, each command in the list also shows its corresponding keyboard shortcut.

SlickEdit does allow one to enter a command in the command line and SlickEdit will show suggestions. Unfortunately, it will only show suggestions whose command name matches at the start of the string. For instance, when I enter "space" in the command line, it only suggests "space-paren". It does not show command suggestions where "space" is not at the start of the command name. Offering suggestions that include the search string anywhere in the command name IMHO would be a significant improvement and bring us closer to what Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ IDEA offer. Displaying the keyboard shortcut to the left of each suggestion would also be a good improvement.

[Clark]

SlickEdit does this in the Key Bindings dialog but not on the command line. If we did change the command line this way it might have to be off by default. I'm afraid too many existing users might not like it (it's really a sensitive emulation thing). I think it would be pretty easy to add.

[jkwuc89]

Enhancing the command line as I suggested and defaulting it to off makes sense. Any chance we could get that in VS 2017?

[Clark]

Looking into it. Can't make any promises yet but my gut says it shouldn't be hard.

[Clark]

Added for next beta. Not in the GUI yet. Give it a try. Set the macro variable "def_command_completion_style" to 0. Default is 1 (prefix matching). Macro>Set Macro Variable...

[jporkkahtc]

There is the gui_list_keybindings dialog.
It searches for any partial match, like the key bindings does.

As is, it only shows the commands which have a binding.

But, a similar version of this dialog could be created that shows all commands and allows you to execute the selected command.

gui_list_keybindings is modal, but should be modeless.

[jkwuc89]

Thanks Clark! I will certainly try this out in the next beta.

[jkwuc89]

Inside 2017 RC1, I set def_command_completion_style to 0 and tried out the new command search. Works great. Thanks!

[mjdl]

There is the gui_list_keybindings dialog.
It searches for any partial match, like the key bindings does.
As is, it only shows the commands which have a binding.
gui_list_keybindings is modal, but should be modeless.

Is there anything simple which can be done by the user to make that dialog non-modal?

[jporkkahtc]

See the attached replacement for keybindings.e.
It is a very small change, but hard to do in a separate macro.
This is based on RC1.
It potentially needs to be updated for each release of slick - annoying.

I typically make C:\Program files\Slickedit\Macros writable by me - makes it a lot easier to customize.


No promises about side effects.
For example, don't expect this dialog to auto-update when you change key bindings.

[mjdl]

Brilliant! Thank you for doing this change (and showing me the API).

(You now have 100 brownie points!)