[edbrowse-dev] spurious empty buffers from textareas

[edbrowse-dev] spurious empty buffers from textareas

[Karl Dahlke]

These have annoyed me for quite a while, and come to find they annoy others as well.
As per our chat discussions, I made a change, but it's a UI change so should be described here.
(Not everyone is on chat.)

A fill out form with a textarea use to allocate a buffer for that area at browse time, looking like <buffer 7>
It now waits to see if you're actually going to use it, since 90% of the time you don't.
It begins life as <buffer ?>

An itext (for input text) command  allocates a buffer and changes it to <buffer 7>
Then you can write text in buffer 7 and submit the form like before.
It's one more step for something that is rarely done,
but it prevents a ton of empty buffers from accumulating.

I have no strong feelings about the actual command name.

itext (input text)
ibuf (input buffer)
iw (input write)
ita (input textarea)

Long as it starts with i I'm ok.

If you change line 760 in decorate.c the old behavior returns.

I'm not documenting any of this until a majority thinks it's a good idea.
My vote is yes but others may disagree.

Karl Dahlke

Re: [edbrowse-dev] spurious empty buffers from textareas

[Chuck Hallenbeck]

I vote yes. It's a small price to pay for long-term stability, IMO.
My preference for the new command would be ib, but I would be okay with
another.

Many thanks.

Chuck

On Wed, 9 Jan 2019, Karl Dahlke wrote:

> These have annoyed me for quite a while, and come to find they annoy others as well.
> As per our chat discussions, I made a change, but it's a UI change so should be described here.
> (Not everyone is on chat.)
>
> A fill out form with a textarea use to allocate a buffer for that area at browse time, looking like <buffer 7>
> It now waits to see if you're actually going to use it, since 90% of the time you don't.
> It begins life as <buffer ?>
>
> An itext (for input text) command  allocates a buffer and changes it to <buffer 7>
> Then you can write text in buffer 7 and submit the form like before.
> It's one more step for something that is rarely done,
> but it prevents a ton of empty buffers from accumulating.
>
> I have no strong feelings about the actual command name.
>
> itext (input text)
> ibuf (input buffer)
> iw (input write)
> ita (input textarea)
>
> Long as it starts with i I'm ok.
>
> If you change line 760 in decorate.c the old behavior returns.
>
> I'm not documenting any of this until a majority thinks it's a good idea.
> My vote is yes but others may disagree.
>
> Karl Dahlke
>

-- 
   Here In Northeast Ohio, The Moon is Waxing Crescent (10% of Full)
    Sent from Nick's missing iPhone.

Re: [edbrowse-dev] spurious empty buffers from textareas

[Tyler Spivey]

I don't really have a preference to the command, but I also vote yes.

What will this do if there's text in that field already? My vote would 
be to say something like <buffer text>, and then let the command just 
put that in. 99% of the time I'm not going to care about whatever 
pre-filled text there is unless I'm filling out the form.

On 1/9/2019 4:18 AM, Karl Dahlke wrote:
> These have annoyed me for quite a while, and come to find they annoy others as well.
> As per our chat discussions, I made a change, but it's a UI change so should be described here.
> (Not everyone is on chat.)
> 
> A fill out form with a textarea use to allocate a buffer for that area at browse time, looking like <buffer 7>
> It now waits to see if you're actually going to use it, since 90% of the time you don't.
> It begins life as <buffer ?>
> 
> An itext (for input text) command  allocates a buffer and changes it to <buffer 7>
> Then you can write text in buffer 7 and submit the form like before.
> It's one more step for something that is rarely done,
> but it prevents a ton of empty buffers from accumulating.
> 
> I have no strong feelings about the actual command name.
> 
> itext (input text)
> ibuf (input buffer)
> iw (input write)
> ita (input textarea)
> 
> Long as it starts with i I'm ok.
> 
> If you change line 760 in decorate.c the old behavior returns.
> 
> I'm not documenting any of this until a majority thinks it's a good idea.
> My vote is yes but others may disagree.
> 
> Karl Dahlke
> 

Re: [edbrowse-dev] spurious empty buffers from textareas

[Dominique Martinet]

Tyler Spivey wrote on Wed, Jan 09, 2019:
> What will this do if there's text in that field already? My vote
> would be to say something like <buffer text>, and then let the
> command just put that in. 99% of the time I'm not going to care
> about whatever pre-filled text there is unless I'm filling out the
> form.

Agreed to that, the command whatever it is probably should insert the
text in the buffer at the time we use it.

I'd actually be daring and suggest that the command would also print
what the current buffer is and switch to the new buffer.
There are two things here:
 - printing the current buffer is mostly a personal opinion. I don't use
buffers all that much so when I do I'm always a bit unsure where I
should come back to; it's not really necessary. I might actually just
have been missing that 'e' without a number prints it..
 - switching automatically is more interesting, but also probably more
controversial. I think if someone says itext or whatever they will want
to use that buffer, so they will eventually switch to it, so why not
now? But on the other hand a command switching buffers might surprise
new people...

Discuss!
-- 
Dominique