Keyboard acceleration extension prototype

Development & Design
1

I have made an extension prototyping a “command palette” approach to keyboard acceleration in OpenRefine(inspired by what one often sees in IDEs). Bugs are guaranteed but I would find it useful to see some thoughts on the approach as further development(support more column actions) would require some refactoring in core.

5 Likes
2

Awesome! Can this be used to call custom Expression snippets?

3

Other extensions can register commands:

Maybe the extension could be made so that it can auto discover things from the Menu-system but that would need quite a bit of upstream work as it’s very state-dependent at the moment. Very few of OpenRefines own column actions are supported right now as they are also very tightly coupled with the menus.

4

forget the menus…
I mean could someone use this to add a Custom Expression to fire off.
Imagine a GREL snippet like:
cells.${MyColumn}.replace("abc","xyz")
and I could store that command in the palette as a custom command called “My Replace”.
The command palette syntax would be:

  1. CTRL+Space to open palette
  2. begin typing “My Replace” and select it from list with up/down and ENTER.
  3. then begin typing the column name, select it from list with up/down and ENTER.
  4. rejoice
5

Ah I see, the answer is “soon”. :slight_smile:

2 Likes
6

Extremely exciting! It brings up a lot of interesting topics:

  • how to rethink OpenRefine’s user experience in bold ways, and escape from those clumsy and overloaded menus
  • how to restructure the code of our front-end to make this easier - perhaps this suggests refactorings that would be meaningful on their own and bring other benefits? I can definitely relate to the issue of coupling with menus at least.
  • or is it even worth it and writing an independent front-end is the way to go?!
  • to what extent this should be officially supported by an extension point, and how to decide what extension points to maintain

Maybe even others? Anyway - a lot of food for thought already!

1 Like
7

@antonin_d seems like we need that BarCamp!

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This looks really interesting @abbe98 - I hope I get time to play around with it soon!

Owen