I strongly feel that the navigation commands should be buttons on the toolbar.-superboyac
I agree as a general principle. At the same time, I am not yet convinced Echo actually needs a toolbar. It's meant to be keyboard-centric, and I kind-of like the sparse UI it has right now. Then again, a toolbar can always be hidden, so I'm adding a to-do!
A very cool feature to add to the editor is the ability to highlight search terms. It's already awesome how the non-matches disappear (like evernote), but to make it perfect, the search terms would be highlighted individually.
I'll be looking into this, but right now, the
control I'm using does not support that. Also, it might impact performance rather badly. But I agree that it would be sweet.
I can see of one use: trying to copy a portion of a clip already in the program.
Quite right. I'll probably redesign that part to have an option whether or not to capture clips from "inside" Echo.
This does involve a small usability problem though. You select a clip, press Shift+F2 to open it in the editor. When you finish editing, the clip is still selected - which is what you would typically expect. However,
if new clips are added while you are editing the clip, then those new clips will get selection focus. At that point it is no longer obvious whether the original clip should be re-selected when you finish editing... which is why I decided to suspend capture during editing in the first place.
In the regular view, you can't highlight a portion of the note without opening the external editor. In fact, if you made the stuff in the regular view selectable, you wouldn't even need an external editor.
It is selectable when editing (F2). But there is only so much I can do with "in-place" editor. I could make it permanent, but consider the price: you would not be able to navigate between clips using arrow keys any more. Imagine: you press down arrow, enter the clip, and the editor is active, so that you can navigate within it, select a part of it, etc. If the clip has more than one line, you would have to press down arrow repeatedly to go past all the lines before you would reach the next (lower) clip. Navigation would become rather annoying. And since this is a clipboard manager, not an editor or a note-taker, I feel that the usability of clip navigation has priority over editing.
But I'd really like to be able to select and copy a portion of a clip without having to double-click on it first, or open up an editor, or any extra steps.
I don't think you can avoid at least one extra step[, otherwise you'd have the navigation nightmare. One thing I could use is the "long click" idiom, or a second click on the same item. Click an icon on the desktop, it selects the icon. Click it again after a short delay, the caption opens for editing. I can do that.
And when I copy that subclip, I'd like the option in the preferences to record or ignore copied subclips. i would set it to record everything including subclips.
The preference, yes. But in the in-place editor the selection issue is even more problematic. A new clip automatically gets selected (and usually placed on top, if you're sorting by date). Consider what that would do if you were editing a clip: select some text, copy it, and in the blink of an eye you are now at the top of the list, with the new clip selected. And it's not just a question of "so don't select the new clip" - you cannot add a new clip to the list without first shutting down the active editor. (At least I don't think it's possible, but I'll check.) When you press F2, a memo-like editor is "invisibly" placed over the clip, so it looks like you're editing the item directly in the list. But you're not: you're working in a little invisible memo. As long as that memo exists, you cannot modify the list in any way (again,
I think you can't).
Another feature I'd love to have (as in CHS and Arsclip) is a quickpaste menu for pasting stuff. So with CHS and ARSclip, with a hotkey, you can have a quickpaste menu appear right under your mouse pointer which is awesome.
I thought the menu in Arsclip was awful! :-) I mean, the menu can show only a small number of items, it cannot be searched or filtered, plus IIRC Arsclip puts it in the tray, which is usually far from where the caret is. So why or how would you use that instead of the main list in Echo? (For example, should the menu contain only certain clips that you mark for inclusion?)
As for the positioning, Echo already tries to show up right next to the caret - or the mouse pointer, if the caret is not available. This doesn't always work; in some cases Echo doesn't seem to detect the caret position, I'll have to look into that at some point.
Also, how about an option to show the entire note in the normal view, regardless of the length. I know we can set it to a big value, but how about just a "always show entire note" setting?
...and then you open "Moby Dick" in a PDF, do Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C... No, I think there has to be a limit. Because if you did that, it would totally kill the search feature - it would take a full minute or so to update the list instead of a split second. Just set it to a really large value if you wish, please :-) .
