1472080 - Hitting Enter while Autocomplete popup is open can be confusing

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(DevTools :: Console, defect, P1)

Description

[Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe]]

**Steps to reproduce**
1. Open the console
2. Type `d`
3. The autocompletion popup open, probably with `decodeUri` item appearing selected
4. Hit Enter

**Expected results**

Since there's an autocompletion popup item "selected", I expect the console to be filled with the selected item  (decodeUri)

**Actual results**

`d` gets evaluated

---

Enter only evaluate the selected autocomplete popup item if the user navigated the autocompletion list (with up or down arrow). This can be very confusing because 2 similar visual state can have different behavior.

The alternatives are the following: 
- Always select the autocomplete popup selected item, even if the user did not navigate the list (which is what Chrome and VsCode do). I guess it wasn't done that way because there might be cases when you want to evaluate what you just typed, and the autocomplete selected item is different from that ? This case shouldn't happen IMO if the autocompletion does its job correctly.
- Don't automatically select the first element from the autocompletion popup. I would be against this I think because then it requires 2 steps to autocomplete.

Comment 1

[Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe]]

Victoria, what do you think of this ?

Comment 2

[Victoria Wang [:victoria]]

Yes! I agree completely with your reasoning on this (single-step, select first autocomplete item, press Enter to fill input with selected item). Easy enough to just keep typing or press ESC if the autocomplete isn't right.

Comment 3

[Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe]]

Attachment: Bug 1472080 - Make Enter always autocomplete the selected result; .

This patch ensure that we have a consistent behavior when
the autocomplete popup is open and the user hit Enter.
We remove the autocompletePopupNavigated property which
is now useless.
We also make sure that we always show the popup when we
have at least one result (previously we needed to have
2 results to make it visible). This is again for
consistency sake and making it more obvious for the
user what will happen when hitting Enter or Tab.
Tests are modified to reflect these new behaviors.

Review commit: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/257514/diff/#index_header
See other reviews: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/257514/

Comment 4

[Brian Grinstead [:bgrins]]

Comment on attachment 8992647 [details]
Bug 1472080 - Make Enter always autocomplete the selected result; .

https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/257514/#review264412

Nice cleanup

::: commit-message-54714:1
(Diff revision 1)
> +Bug 1472080 - Better console input autocompletion behaviour; r=bgrins.

Please change this line to explain the behavior change. Maybe: "Make Enter always autocomplete the selected result" or something like that.

Comment 5

[Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe]]

Comment on attachment 8992647 [details]
Bug 1472080 - Make Enter always autocomplete the selected result; .

Review request updated; see interdiff: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/257514/diff/1-2/

Comment 6

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/616da64bc004
Make Enter always autocomplete the selected result; r=bgrins.

Comment 7

[Eliza Balazs [:ebalazs_]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/616da64bc004