Accordion for Sources in prompt buffer ui

[lansingthomas]

Dear Priests of the Transistor,

Last week we discussed a few ways to help users display the most relevant suggestions and to avoid excess scrolling in the prompt buffer UI. There was some positive consensus regarding collapsing and displaying suggestions within sources

My view is that an accordion like this does a good job of providing lots of info early, and leaving it up to the user to determine what is important for them in that moment.

Please provide a nice collapsing-accordion feature for our Sources

might look like:

This feature:

• must visually communicate status {open, closed} with an icon
  • perhaps with a - for open-state (to show that clicking the - will remove suggestions
  • perhaps with a ⋁ for closed-state (to show that clicking the ∨ will provide more suggestions
• must collapse the suggestions and attribute column titles of a Source when a user clicks the - icon
• must display the suggestions and attribute column titles of a Source when a user clicks the ∨ icon
• IF the user collapses a Source WHILE their blue selector is targeting a suggestion within that Source the blue selector should move to the top suggestion of the next open-status Source
• should have a hover area behind the icons to communicate that icons are clickable buttons.

regarding the icon choices

• I like a minus - because it communicates the removal of options
• I like a ∨ because it resembles a down arrow -- which communicates that more suggestions exist below. It is a visualization of the logical operator for OR -- which gives a sense of providing alternative suggestions.
  • I see a case where we might use a + symbol here, but I would like to start with a ∨ because I want to leave the + available for another purpose (add/subtract attribute-columns) in a future time.

Thank you : )

[aadcg]

@lansingthomas, after thinking about it for quite some time, I don't see much benefit in this proposal.

In fact, I consider the ability to easily switch between sources much more important than collapsing them. And we already provide the former.

With that said, I'd suggest closing this issue. CC @aartaka @jmercouris

[aartaka]

I'm not sure...

[aadcg]

Let's vote. A decision is better than no decision.

I'm against, @lansingthomas is for. @aartaka is not sure.

@jmercouris and @Ambrevar: we're interested in your thoughts.

[Ambrevar]

I'm OK with having it in, but not collapse anything by default.

In the long run, we could have full-page, long-lived prompters where this feature would be very useful.

[aadcg]

I think I've understood why I don't see the need to implement this.

The structure of suggestions in the prompt buffer is very simple. There are sources and each source has suggestions. This is not a complex tree structure with an arbitrary level of nestedness. Plus, the cursor is only placed on the suggestions. The source titles are purely informative. In other words, navigating suggestions in the prompt buffer is actually like navigating a flat list where subsets of the list have labels (=sources). Think of a supermarket buying list where there are categories like vegetables or dairy products.

I think that collapsing is very helpful when navigating hierarchic data like trees.

If I have my cursor at the first suggestion of the 2nd source and the 1st source is collapsed, the only extra piece of information I get is the title of the 1st source. But I don't see much benefit in it. Plus the extra burden of collapsing and expanding each source. Sounds like over engineering to me.

I agree with @Ambrevar that if such a feature would exist, it wouldn't make sense to collapse sources by default.

[jmercouris]

Slight correction, I believe Pierre said that no sources should be collapsed by default :-D

[aadcg]

Oops, that's a typo. In my message above I was agreeing with @Ambrevar. I'll edit it.

[aadcg]

@lansingthomas waiting for your final word on this one.

[lansingthomas]

Let's NOT do it.
Thank you. We have other priorities, and I have failed to provide evidence that this is an improvement.