Hi Oliver,
Certainly a useful suggestion, though it will require some implementation effort.  Right now, the command line has no “state” — when you type something, it doesn’t need to know what keys were typed before, whereas with your suggestion when someone types up/down arrow the behavior depends on whether the preceding typed key was an up/down arrow or was some other key.  Also, nothing in the code monitors every keystroke; only some keystrokes (e.g. up/down arrow, Return) are handled as they occur.
Consequently, this is getting on my to-do list but may be awhile before anything materializes.

—Eric

Eric Pettersen
UCSF Computer Graphics Lab

On Oct 12, 2015, at 5:59 AM, Oliver Clarke <olibclarke@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Eric, I have been using the alterations you made to history navigation in Chimera and I like them a lot - they make it much easier to locate old commands.

I have one suggestion for a slight tweak… at the moment, scrolling up through the history (with Shift+Up) seems to update the string to filter on as I scroll. There is a (very) minor issue with this approach. It means the process is not reversible and the results depend on the contents and ordering of the history.

For example, lets say I’m looking for a command I typed a while back, i know it started with “bond” but can’t remember the exact name of the command. If I type “bond” and then hit Shift+Up, I will only find the first matching command - if I had both bondrepr and bondzone in my command history, for example, I will only see the first one. I think it would be more intuitive if history filtering paid attention to only the initially typed string, if that is possible - so if I type “bond”, I will scroll up through bondrepr, bond zone, bonddisplay etc, and will obtain the same results heading back “down” through the command history.

Cheers,
Oli.


On Oct 1, 2015, at 3:31 PM, Eric Pettersen <pett@cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:

I also just tweaked the up/down history navigation so that if the navigation would produce a result identical to whatever is currently in the command line, it “keeps going” until it yields a results that isn’t identical.  This applies to both normal up/down and shifted up/down.  So, if you have several consecutive identical entries in your command history, this effectively treats them as one entry and therefore may reduce the need for a preference to not record consecutive identical entries in the command history…

—Eric

Eric Pettersen
UCSF Computer Graphics Lab

On Oct 1, 2015, at 6:35 AM, Oliver Clarke <olibclarke@gmail.com> wrote:

Just tried out the new daily build and the command line history autofiltering works great, thanks Eric! This makes it much easier to cycle through previous selection commands, or to remember syntax for previous vop commands.

Cheers,
Oliver.

On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 2:46 PM, Oliver Clarke <olibclarke@gmail.com> wrote:
That sounds great, thanks Eric! I look forward to trying it out, think it'll be a real timesaver!

Cheers,
Oli.

On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 2:19 PM, Eric Pettersen <pett@cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:
Hi Oliver,
        This seems like a useful suggestion.  I have implemented it in a slightly different form.  If you use the shift key while navigating the command history (i.e. shift up/down arrow or control-N/P), then it will jump to the next history entry that matches the current command name.  Available in the next daily build.

—Eric

> On Sep 23, 2015, at 2:42 PM, Oliver Clarke <olibclarke@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Just a suggestion (I guess for chimera 2) - would it be possible to autofilter the command history based on the typed substring?
>
> That is if I have typed “sel” and hit the up arrow, to only cycle through those commands in the history that start with “sel”.
>
> This would be particularly handy for scrolling quickly through recent “sel” and “color” commands - a similar mechanism is implemented in several shells and it works well.
>
> Cheers,
> Oliver.
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