Shoutbox

Hi guys! This is my first post...
I was thinking: what about an emoticons shortcut auto-completion? It could also have a preview of the emo to be added.. in fact i have lots of emos and it's very hard to remember all shortcuts while writing.. and the emos quick-pane becomes too slow to use, if you know which emo to add but u have to find it between 100's...

You haven't explained your post well, but after thinking about it, I think I know what you mean. You want for example, when you type a message similar to an emotion, the panel comes up, narrowing down your results. A bit like modern search tools.

Good idea, but it is very impractical. It would be hard to know how your emoticon shortcuts are formatted. For some it is a word, others start with '(' or ':', thus making it nearly impossible to achieve, unless you have your emotions all organised. Another point is you may find it annoying when type a sentence, and the panel suddenly pops up when you don't want it to .

yes... i thought every programmer knows what autocomplete (or intellisense, or wathever) is.. my mistake! anyway, it could be something like having a keyboard shortcut and a partial emoticon name search (a kind of search like jump to file dialog in winamp, only smaller and simpler, as emo names are only 7 chars...) i think it's a very useful feature!

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Originally posted by absorbation
Good idea, but it is very impractical.

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It is very well possible.

Both in the form of a selected text as you type (autocomplete), as in the form of a panel comming up which narrows the images down (intellisense).

Although a panel popping up is almost useless*, since it will only show 1 emoticon anyways, since emoticons shortcuts can not be part of other emoticon shortcuts ( "myemo" and "myemo1" can't both exist since "myemo" will always be shown before you even can type "1" after it), although Messenger allows it that you have such shortcuts, they wont work.

*It would only be able to show a selection of emoticons by the very first character you type (eg: emoticon shortcuts beginning with "(" or beginning with ":", etc)

Normal textual autocomplete/type-ahead is very well possible though.

But here too, there can only be 1 autocompleted shortcut shown, obviously... (unless you also implement a shortcut key (typically it is a press on the TAB key) which cycles and shows the next matching shortcut)

Note, Messenger Plus! provides objects like:
    Messenger::CustomEmoticons
    ChatWnd::EditText
    ChatWnd::EditText_GetCurSelStart
    ChatWnd::EditText_GetCurSelEnd
    ChatWnd::EditText_ReplaceSel
    ChatWnd::EditText_SetCurSel
    OnEvent_ChatWndEditKeyDown

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Though, I'd suspect that if you run such a script, the typing will be slowed down a lot since you constantly need to do a lot of stuff which each keypress (eg: getting all emoticons and their shortcuts each time, since they can change on the fly!), not to mention the constant showing and updating of the panel with each keypress...

Using a timeout and using a time delay will reduce the slowness a bit, but not entirly.

Also, it hugly depends on the amount of emoticons you have. But since you have so much emoticons you can't remember all the shortcuts, it would also mean this script will slow everything down _a lot_, making it as good as unuseable.

yes you may be right.. but i was talking about something that you can *explicitly* call, like pressing Ctrl+E (e for emos, of course ), and that can show up an intellisense-like panel that is searched and narrowed while you tipe *a part* of the emo name, that can or not be the beginning of its name; that way, you don't have to care about "(" and other chars at the beginning of your emo name. Another useful feature could be a small preview of currently highlighted emo in the panel, to see if it's the one you want. To speed up it all you could also implement this feature, maybe as an optional one, into Plus!...

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Originally posted by rock3r
tipe *a part* of the emo name

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By the time you get emoticon you want, you be finished. Why not just printing out a list of default emoticons instead?

Thats why there are shortcuts for each emoticon. And you can always use the Plus! ( thing.

yes but "the Plus! ( thing" is *very* slow because it has to prepare previews of all emos, and is also very messy because if you have several "large" emos, like i do (even organized in categories) you can't find them very easily

Your idea is good, however creating a script for it will take some time and effort. Because the demand for something like this is not high enough, people simply don't want to develop this. It may be best if this was part of Messenger Plus! itself .

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To speed up it all you could also implement this feature, maybe as an optional one, into Plus!...

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just what i was thinking

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Originally posted by rock3r
yes you may be right.. but i was talking about something that you can *explicitly* call, like pressing Ctrl+E (e for emos, of course ), and that can show up an intellisense-like panel that is searched and narrowed while you tipe *a part* of the emo name, that can or not be the beginning of its name; that way, you don't have to care about "(" and other chars at the beginning of your emo name. Another useful feature could be a small preview of currently highlighted emo in the panel, to see if it's the one you want. To speed up it all you could also implement this feature, maybe as an optional one, into Plus!...

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tbh, something like this will never be faster than the current implemented way. Something like a intellisense-like panel, and certainly when you consider parts of shortcuts*, needs a lot more processing than simply showing a complete panel

*Which means your panel will always be showing up and slowing everything down since whatever you type you will always have one or more emoticons which apply to those keystrokes.

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Originally posted by rock3r
yes but "the Plus! ( thing" is *very* slow because it has to prepare previews of all emos

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It simply takes the previews already on your hard disk, the ones from Messenger itself. Hence, this is done in a split second...

What you probably mean by slow is the time between typing "(" and the panels showing up, which is by default 500ms. But that can be tweaked by setting a registry setting:
http://www.msgpluslive.net/help/registry/ > QuickIconsParenthesisDelay

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QuickIconsParenthesisDelay
default: REG_DWORD 500

Delay, in milliseconds, used to display the Quick Icons panel when a parenthesis ('(' character) is typed in a message. The range of acceptable values is 1 to 10,000 inclusive.

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So either add/change it manually:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Patchou\Messenger Plus! Live\your_msn_account\Preferences\QuickIconsParenthesisDelay
or either use Choli's Plus! Live Registry Tweaker.