New Feature: Omnibar

[Azurency]

Issue by chaorace
Saturday Jan 07, 2017 at 07:17 GMT
Originally opened as CQUI-Org/cqui#225

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So, if you've used an editor like Sublime or an IDE like IntelliJ, you've probably encountered a bar like this:

It's a bar which contains all of the available commands for the application and allows you to dynamically search for them. I'd like to add something like that to CQUI, because I think there's lots of potential for dramatically improving UI speed for powerusers this way.

Example: open omnibar, start typing city name, tab to autocomplete, type "pro", tab to autocomplete "produce", type "hor", tab to autocomplete "horseman", enter to send a new horseman entry to the start of the selected city queue.

The possibilities are basically endless here, so I definitely think it's worth the effort investment. Still, it's a considerable undertaking that would come at the cost of other features if I started working on it right now, which is why I'm hoping to gauge excitement for something like this. So what do you guys think? What kind of actions would you like to be completeable using an omnibar, and what kind of syntax do you think would work best?

[Azurency]

Comment by Remolten
Saturday Jan 07, 2017 at 16:04 GMT

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I think this would probably go beyond the scope of the project. The implementation of this feature would be incredibly expensive, and I don't believe it is useful for enough users to warrant development.

[Azurency]

Comment by chaorace
Saturday Jan 07, 2017 at 21:51 GMT

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@Remolten Ultimately, the stated goal of CQUI is to reduce clicks and make useful information more readily available. An omnibar feature falls squarely within the reducing clicks category, it's effectively just a very flexible way to implement keyboard shortcuts when you get right down to it.

As for implementation cost, it wouldn't be an all-or-nothing endeavor. This is definitely the kind of feature that can be implemented piecemeal over time