[PATCH] Position cursor at end of line when browsing console history

[Ross Bearman]

After a request from vtsj on IRC, I've patched CConsole to position the cursor at the end of the line when browsing up or down through history.

Currently if you type something and then press up or dow it will show all entries that start with that string; however if the cursor is then moved to the end of the line the next search up or down will search for that entire string. Therefore in order to implement the positioning of the cursor at the end of the line, the prefix search would have to be removed.

Common shells (Windows cmd, bash and others) don't use this kind of prefix searching, although zsh implements a separate functionality for searching through history.

After a short discussion with Phillip on IRC I decided to submit this patch and allow the developers to decide whether it's more intuitive/useful to have the cursor at the end of the line or the prefix searching.

[Ross Bearman]

Patches CConsole to move the cursor to the end of the line on history searches, removes prefix searching.

[vts]

Patch appears to work great! Much easier to quickly edit arguments now, and no more need to look closely to see where the cursor's at.

[Philip Taylor]

I don't think I've ever liked the prefix search thing, so I'll commit this to see if anyone complains :-)

(Made some trivial changes: fixed some trailing whitespace and missing space in "if (" (not that this code is very consistent about formatting in any case...))

[philip]

(In [9939]) Replace console prefix-search behaviour with more standard history navigation, based on patch by Ross Bearman. Fixes #906.

[Ross Bearman]

I wasn't sure if it was appropriate for me to make changes to improve the formatting for the file as a whole and include them in this patch. Thoughts on that?

[Philip Taylor]

If a patch is already changing some lines of code then I think it's good for it to change the formatting of those lines to be more consistent; but larger changes to formatting should probably be separate patches, without changing any functionality at the same time, so it's easy to verify they're not accidentally altering behaviour.

(Usually I don't personally care about formatting enough to spend effort improving it for its own sake, and only change it if I'm already having to read and modify that code, so the old code evolves towards consistency very slowly (but hopefully new code is more consistent). CConsole does look quite a bad case though, with internally-inconsistent style and with a static variable where surely a member variable would be appropriate...)

[Ross Bearman]

Mm, that's generally my thinking; but as you pointed out CConsole is in quite a state. I may create a separate patch for general improvements to CConsole and see if there is anything else that could be useful while I'm at it.