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Toggling show/hide of inherited names during Content Assist? [message #1821550]

Fri, 14 February 2020 15:40

J. Zufallig

Messages: 18
Registered: May 2013

Junior Member

When I hit Ctrl+Space, sometimes the list can be of considerable length because the inheritance chain is deep and/or some of the parent classes have a cluttered API. For example, the DefaultListCellRenderer class is pretty small in its own right, but it's derived from JLabel -> JComponent -> AWT's Container -> AWT's Component and by that point the Content Assist dropdown list contains approximately 2.713*10^4 entries and my mouse wheel has given up and gone on strike.

When I already know the name that I'm looking for, as in the trivial case of DefaultListCellRenderer, then the "problem" is noisy but irrelevant. But if I'm trying to find the name of a method that I'm not even sure exists, then Content Assist is frustrating to wade through. I end up jumping to source code (assuming I have some) and then just Ctrl+F'ing my way through the file.

The Content Assist list can already cycle through different things, and the user has some measure of control over which categories are presented. But the possible "type filters" require us to already know which names we want to filter out. I'd love to be able to cycle between entire list of everything that we currently have, and only the names from the most-derived class. The list in Content Assist already has that information available, because it's listing the source names on each line; I just want it to do the filtering instead of me scrolling slowly and hoping I don't blink past one.

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Re: Toggling show/hide of inherited names during Content Assist? [message #1821577 is a reply to message #1821550]

Sat, 15 February 2020 21:18

Stephan Herrmann

Messages: 1853
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

I don't think Ctrl+Space is the best feature for your task, because we don't have sufficient UI for manipulating various filters, and if we cycle through so many variants of proposal then it's hard to get the right number of Ctrl+Space strokes. After all, Ctrl+Space is meant for fluent typing, not for comprehensive search.

If you need to discover s.t. with an unknown name, I suggest you simply navigate to the receiver class and use Ctrl+O, which does have the option to include (press Ctrl+O again) or exclude inherited members. Also the Type Hierarchy view's member pane could be of help for you (perhaps you are searching for a member of a direct super class? etc.).

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