419137 - Implementation of a "smart" tab-completion

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Other Applications :: ChatZilla, enhancement)

Description

[Zach Kanzler]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12
Build Identifier: 0.9.81

The auto-tab feature, as I call it, is the feature that lets you begin writing a user's name, press tab, and have ChatZilla complete the name for you. It's very convenient, but it could be more intelligent.

For example, it could take into account the active users in a channel (or the last users to speak) and the past few users' names who have been spoken. When the end user presses tab at a name, it should shoot for an active member whose name has been uttered recently.

Going further, it might also be useful to record how many times the end user has written a specific user's name, by having a ticker. This way, ChatZilla will have a bit of info when no one in the channel is active, or the end user has just connected.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Write a part of someone's name that conflicts with another user's (e.g. type "the" in a channel with users "theY4Kman" and "theYAMS")
2. Press tab.
Actual Results:  
Nothing.

Expected Results:  
Evaluated the current state of the channel and realized that you wanted to write "theY4Kman" (Because he's godly, of course)

Comment 1

[James Ross]

Just correcting the summary to the official name of the existing feature. This also depends on the tab-completion being changed from prefixing to cycling (I'm sure we had a bug for this, but maybe we closed it).

I'm not sure we want the potential unpredictability this might result in, but it's certainly an interesting idea.

Just in case you missed it, there is already a pseudo-intelligent component to tab-completion: if you hit <tab> with nothing in the input box, it'll complete to an appropriate response to the last message on that view to mention your nickname ("/msg nick " for private messages, "nick: " for channel chat).