Re: About the new long/short options changes

[Sven Wischnowsky <wischnow@informatik.hu-berlin.de>]

Bart Schaefer wrote:

> I mostly like the way it looks in listings, though I wish it would line up
> the single-letter options in a column (or else always list the short form
> first when there is one, though that might look odd when some of the long
> forms have no short form).

My only problem with that is that there may be cases where we have more
than two matches with the same description, something like:

--foo          --Foo  --fOO  -- turn on fooing
--long-option                -- turn on longing

If that gets out of hand... But then I don't know how often this will
happen at all.

> However, I strongly *dis*like the way it works in menu-selection.  So much
> so that I'd rather just turn it off entirely if it can't be made to work
> better.  In particular I don't want selection to consume twice as many
> lines (half of which are largely blank) as listing consumes.  I find it
> better to have listing consume more lines in the first place than to have
> the display change so radically when switching from listing to selection.

I think you have seen from the discussion that I'm not happy about it,
too.  One thing we could do is allow users to de-select the long/short
form as has been suggested (there is a slight problem with
auto-descriptions, btw).

The other is to try to implement what you and we prefer anyway:

> ...
> 
> What I'd like to see, I think, is something like the following (where `['
> and `]' delimit the menu-selection highlight).  For purposes of drawing
> a more interesting picure, suppose that the -X option doesn't exist.
> 
>   Completing option
>  [--binary                ] -b -- Unix line endings LF
> ...
> 
> TAB to the next selection (list now truncated for brevity):
> 
>   Completing option
>   --binary                 [-b -- Unix line endings LF                   ]
> ...

Really that or: 

    --binary                 [-b] -- Unix line endings LF

?
 
> After three more TABs:
> 
>   Completing option
>   --binary                  -b -- Unix line endings LF
>   --change-cygdrive-prefix  -c -- cygdrive prefix
>  [--cygwin-executable          -- all files under mountpoint are cygwin e]
> ...

Same here.

I have some ideas how we could achive this, part of the stuff we need is
already there.  Think of some combination of list-packed, list-rows-first
and `dummy' matches that get slots in the listing but show nothing and
can't be selected.  We'll have to find a way to make this easy to select
and handle.  I'll think about this at the weekend.


What are we coming to... ;-)


Bye
  Sven


-- 
Sven Wischnowsky                         wischnow@informatik.hu-berlin.de