[PD] auto-completion with popup [was: 3 new gui-plugins]

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On May 7, 2011, at 2:02 PM, yvan volochine wrote:

>>>> IMHO it would be better to see what kind of extra libs/plugins are
>>>> loaded without debug level (it's easy to forget that you have this
>>>> maybe-buggy thing in your path).
>>>> I'd vote for posting those by default.
>>>
>>> i'd do a gui-plugin that raises the debug-level.
>>
>> That's always a possibility, you can set the default debug level  
>> with a
>> one liner like:
>>
>> set ::loglevel 4
>>
>> As for what should be the default behavior, that's a tough question.
>> I've heard from a lot of newbies that having lots of text in the Pd
>> window at startup is quite intimidating, so I think its good to  
>> really
>> only show errors and strong warnings by default. More advanced  
>> users can
>> hopefully figure out how to set the log level.
>
> I see gui-plugins more like "add-ons" and seeing that some of them  
> behave strangely, I think it's a good habit to have infos about  
> external libs being loaded in default debug level.
>
> from a noob pov it could easily lead to problems such as:
>
> - why is pd behaving strangely suddenly ?
> - remove all your gui-plugins and try again ?
> - ooh, I forgot that I used xxx-plugin which is breaking pd !
>
> this kind of infos posted at startup would make sense to me:
> Gem version x
> Gridflow version x
> xxx-plugin version x
> ...
>
> but maybe that's just me ;)
> I understand your point though and I'll remove it from my code.


Those Gem, etc version reports are just the thing that the people I  
talked to were complaining about.  If you are totally new, then being  
hit with a wall of mystery text can be intimidating.

 From my perspective, I also don't want to see anything but errors by  
default, because I can always easily switch to see the debug log. I  
think in this case, the interests of newbies and advanced users align  
nicely.

Also, I think Pd-extended should include a number of plugins by  
default, like perhaps your completion plugin.  So that would mean that  
the plugin reports would be shown by default.

.hc

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