Highlight matching string
Closed this issue · 3 comments
ctrlp.vim (and probably other fuzzies) highlight the matching substring with colors:
ctrlp
I like this since it gives fast visual feedback over what's matching. This is especially useful if you make a mistake, since you can deduce if you did something wrong directly while looking at the result.
Would this be a nice feature for selecta too?
It's a nice detail, but does it really help with use, or is it just a cute distraction? I think it's probably the latter for me, since I can't remember ever taking an action based on it. But maybe other people do take action based on it? Or maybe it's useful to help new users understand what a fuzzy search is actually doing? What do you think? What's your motivation? (If it's simply that it's neat, I vote against, because I have to maintain this stuff. :)
Implementing it would probably require carrying the matching substring data along with a match. That probably means replacing the simple array of matching strings in the Search class with one Choice/Match/whatever object per string. That may have performance implications due to overhead of Ruby objects vs. simple strings (I'm just guessing, though; I haven't tried it.) There's a chance that these Choice/Match objects will be introduced anyway to facilitate some performance optimizations in #53.
Most of the time I don't even look at the selecta output. I just notice that something is popping up, type ahead and wait till my fail is showing up in vim. I was using command-t for a long time and can't even remember if had that feature. Personally it's not something I noticed or am missing.
My use-cases actually don't stretch much longer than the mistake one I already mentioned. I noted that when I typoed something I was expecting to see my mistake right away, and my brain did this quick segfault that it does when it expects something of a pattern and that didn't happen. :) It's not a big deal, and in the spirit of keeping things simple, I say this can be dropped!
Closing this.