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A tool that can autocomplete commands typing

Sun, 03/05/2017 - 02:12 am

Autocompletion is very common in a real programming language IDE, such as VS, but it is a pity that IGOR Pro does not support this. Therefore, I have written a tool to do autocomplete in IGOR Pro.
The Package includes two files: Autocomplete_JXW.ipf, datacache.dat, the first is the procedure file, the second is a database file, contains function/operation name and a brief description of it.

How to use:

1 open Autocomplete_JXW.ipf and compile it,

2 in a new procedure window, enter the first fiew characters of a function or command (most people can remember the first few characters), and then press F8

3 a dialog comes up to show all function and operations start with the characters you enter,select the right one in the drop-down menu, and view the description (if the database file contains the description of the command)

4 press done, the dialog automatically shut down, press ctrl+v to paste the full spelling in the current location

Note:
Datacache saved under the root datafolder as a text wave, you can add a new function/operationand its description in this wave,after that press F10 to save. Press F9 to load datacache. Don't deliberately add a newline character(\r), because when loading the different function and operations is each saved in a single line in the datacache.dat.

Thinngs should be mentioned is that:
appearently this datacache.dat file make this tool not so easier to use. I also dont like it. However I can not think of other way to do it beacause I can not find a function that can GET INFORMATION OF A BUILT-IN FUNCTION OR OPERATION. If Igor can offer such a function that can return help information about the built-in function or operation, we can just remove the datacache.dat. Hope the next version of igor can add this feature!!!!! The user defined functions dont have this problem becaust I can get their codes using current functions offered by igor.

Improvements needed:
1 This tool does not support user-defined functions. Yet I have an idea to do this, in the user - defined function, entering contents such as ///note:some descriptions, and then
write a small tool to extract this information and insert it to datacache.

2 function/operation description in the dialog is not optimized, if the description is too long, some of the characters will be displayed out of the dialog box.
This two problem are not difficult, but I am now really busy that I dont have much time to do it. Futher I may work on this but not in the near future. Of course, If anyone can do it, or even improve this whole tool, please share your work with me.

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