Previewing your poses/emotes

I was already derailing another thread about a feature-request I did for this plugin, so I figured I'd give it its own topic to give it a bit more attention. Hopefully, people will like what they see and come with some feature requests and such that I can work on until the next version of MUSH comes out. Imo, even in its somewhat crude form right now, I already get a lot of usefulness out of it.

Some screenshots (most recent first):
* http://qs.merseine.nu/images/previewer3.png
* http://qs.merseine.nu/images/previewer2.png
* http://qs.merseine.nu/images/previewer1.png

Currently implemented features:
* Spellchecking with squiggles!
* Variable text-width support.
* Mostly based on world-settings.
* Diku (colour) support (mud_diku.lua)
* Support for other muds/codebases through the same system Diku above was implemented.
* Skinning (layout.lua). The more recent screenshots show a layout in which the preview window takes the bottom of the normally available textrectangle, and shifts the textrectangle itself up an appropriate amount so the most recent output remains the bottom-most part of the view.
* A toggle for the white line inbetween different paragraphs.

Features yet to implement:
* A -pretty- skin rather than something with ugly lines that help me find off-by-one mistakes in my math. I could use an artist for that, if anyone actually proves to be interested.
* Persistent settings of the kind of mud / kind of layout. Right now, the includes are a little bit hard-coded. Oops.
* A toggle to make it replace the top part of the tectrectangle rather than the bottom bit, since I figure some people might prefer it (among who might be me - I'm not sure yet).
* Alt+#number to select the #number'th incorrect word in your input, ready for direct replacement in typing. (Needs new version of MUSHclient for that.)
* Actual live-updating of the typed text. (Needs new version of MUSHclient also.) Timers are a tadbit too laggy / cpu-intensive.


Depending on how long it takes for the next version of MUSHclient and whether there's any interest at all, I might release an incomplete (manually activated) version in the meanwhile.

Comments, questions and what-else-not are appreciated. :)

Okay! With v4.38 spreading love all through the world, I got back to this already. Thanks for the loving with http://www.gammon.com.au/forum/?id=9080&page=999 Nick :)

* http://qs.merseine.nu/images/previewer4.png

I've got the following two implemented now:

* Alt+#number to select the #number'th incorrect word in your input, ready for direct replacement in typing. I already fell in love with this.. despite it nearly always ending up being Alt+1 being entered (since correcting it means numbers get re-assigned, heh.)
* Actual live-updating of the typed text. Woo!

Also found some time to implement the following that bugged me while coding...
* Squiggle size and weight. They can now both be increased to become more pronounced, as can be seen in the screenshot above.

So, now to get back to...
Features yet to implement:
* A -pretty- skin rather than something with ugly lines that help me find off-by-one mistakes in my math. I could use an artist for that, if anyone actually proves to be interested. (Although I might have someone mocking me something up.. *hopes*)
* Persistent settings of the kind of mud / kind of layout. Right now, the includes are a little bit hard-coded. Oops.
* A toggle to make it replace the top part of the tectrectangle rather than the bottom bit, since I figure some people might prefer it (among who might be me - I'm not sure yet).

Crap, too much to work on still. :( I'll try to release a test version one of these days. Comments and critics are welcome!

I think your general idea could be extended to do a few other things, other than simple spellchecking.

Here are some ideas:

• Automatic help - for example, when I haven't mudded for a while, I usually forget whether I have to type "give <item> <person>" or "give <person> <item>".
  
  So, similar to the spellchecker, once you type "give " a little window would pop up like your spellcheck one, that gives you the command syntax.
  
• Similarly for MUSHclient script keywords. For example, if the cursor was next to AddTrigger, a window might pop up showing the correct arguments.
  
• On-the-fly replacement of words. For example, if I find myself typing Worstje often, but find it a bit hard to type, I might type W` and the script detects W` and replaces it with Worstje.
  
• Context-sensitive spellchecking. For example, checking that the very first word on a line is a valid MUD command. For instance, I might be replying to a tell from you and type "Certainly" but forget to put "say" in front of it. Now "certainly" passes the spellcheck, but fails the check "is this a valid MUD command?".

Awesome suggestions. I'm gonna give implementing those a definite shot to see how they work out. :D

I should probably clean up my current code too, but it has reached the stage of 'lots of tinkering finally got it right' >_>

On that note don't forget the check for AutoSay...
As well as a table of all commands that the line could start with, and also don't forget to make it case sensitive if desired, because some commands like say, and SAY, and Say, of course work differently on different muds/mushes.

Just my 2 cents, I just cant wait for this to be finished, as this would be a real time saver when I do get back into my SerenityMUSH. I would probably use it more along the lines of a command checker, and less of a spell checker, as I never have spelling trouble, well if you ask someone that uses American English and not British, nor Aussie English.

I also love the idea of on-the-fly replacement, as well as the popup syntax help, that would really be nice if I could log all of the MUSH commands/coding commands and then create a help popup when I have the need to read a help file, and save the server a few Kb in transmission, although this does not matter in this day an age, but it still could slow the players down a little less :)

-Onoitsu2

Oh, AutoSay.. good that you mention it. *adds it to the list*

Right now, I'm hitting some bumps along the road with tons of little bugs I keep bumping into. If I were to rewrite the entire thing it could probably end up a fair bit neater, but right now I am not sure if I want to or can do that. While it is pretty efficient from what I can spot, the code is looking like a frankenstein of fixed snags under the hood (despite seperating logic and content wherever possible). On which note... I must admire Nick's work with MUSHclient more every time I muck around in this plugin. ^^ Particularly properly relating commandwindow input to the processed text has proven to be a pain due to my adding it this late in the process.

But yeah, enough babble. I will see what I can do, although the entire display is currently built around the idea of displaying paragraphs of text - not lists or making code suggestions. Many ideas will probably need a bit of restructuring and thus go a bit lower on the TODO list.

Well, I reckoned the time has come for a release of sorts. It still lacks a lot of things (flexibility and configurability comes to mind), but it might already be useful to some people in its current form.

I take no responsibility for mental scarring as a result of looking at the code. :D

http://qs.merseine.nu/images/previewer5.png

Version 0.7 includes support for AutoSay, minus the 'exclude macros' setting since I am not really sure how to implement that yet. It also comes with a pretty new skin that I ended up basing off my desktop theme (which was free on the net somewhere and credit is given in the code).

For now, included functionality is limited to DIKU muds and two commands - pose and emote. Except by jumping into the code, not much can be configured either.. but so far getting it working was enough of a challenge :)

A download can be found at: http://qs.merseine.nu/download/20090219%20Previewer.zip

Comments and bug reports are appreciated! :)

Maybe I'm just way too slow or something, but while I have this plugin installed, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get that preview window to come u. Am I missing something super simple? I'm very sure that I am.

Any help would be much appreciated!

I got emote to work. I could not get other channels to work. I wonder if that it could be modified somehow.

I'm surprised to see some people finally took notice of this little plugin. :)

Sadly, I stopped working on it. There was no real interest in it by most people, and I found the complexity had gotten a little bit out of hand as well, making it difficult to add new things.

Given time and effort, that could definitely be improved, but as I have stopped playing on the places I personally intended to use it for, I haven't seen any need to do that.

Did you take a look at the readme? It should explain all that is needed to get it going. Particularly the Previewer:actions command should tell you which commands are supported by the engine(s) you have loaded.

If anyone wants to work on it or tackle writing things to suit their purposes, let me know and I'll help out wherever you run into speedbumps. Who knows, I might even pick it up actively once more. :)