Oxygen XML Forum

When I use Oxygen to create an XML document, it insists on popping up
lists of options. For example, after typing "<" it displays a list of the items
it thinks could follow. I find this extremely irritating, as the pop-up
invariably covers text I need to look at and it is cumbersome to get rid of
it.

How can I stop these pop-ups appearing and yet not lose the related
feature that is actually useful: auto-completion of tags?

Dear Peter Robertson

In the Oxygen options menu in the Preferences/Tag insight/Features page there is a "Use Tag Insight" option.
This option disables the pop-up to appear every time you press "<". On the other hand, you can force the pop-up to appear at any time by pressing the "Ctrl-Space" keys.
So you can type your tag like "<pers" then press the Ctrl-Space keys and the pop-up will give you the appropriate tags for the context you are in.


Hope this helps,
Regards, Radu.

If you read my question you will see:

How can I stop these pop-ups appearing and yet not lose the related
feature that is actually useful: auto-completion of tags?

Turning off tag insight also turns off automatic tag completion!

Dear Peter,

I am sorry but I did not understand exactly the nature of your problem.

So, as I understand from your second post, you want to disable the pop-up window completely. But also, if you type the start of a tag for example in an XML Schema typing "<xs:ann" you want to trigger auto completion (maybe with a key shortcut) so that it is replaced with "<xs:annotation></xs:annotation>". Of course this would be possible only if there would be no other tags staring with "<xs:ann" that would fit in this context.
If this is not what you meant maybe a small example would prove useful.


Regards, Radu.

I think you still misunderstand my question.

I want to be in a state where two things happen:

1: There are NO pop-ups.
2: When I type "<" followed by "/", I get the automatic completion
of the end tag (without having to type anything else). So, if I type the
six characters "<", "a", ">", "x", "<", "/" I want the output to look like:
<a>x</a>
This is exactly what happens when tag insight is turned on.

Some of the many reasons I want to disable pop-ups are:
1: They get in the way;
2: They don't go away without either typing blind (they obscure the
place I'm typing) or clicking all over the place;
3: They seem to be so slow that they catch input keystrokes,
resulting in unwanted tags being inserted. For example, I am forever
getting <abbrev> inserted.

All of these considerably slow down document input.

Hello,

PeterRobertson wrote: 1: There are NO pop-ups.
2: When I type "<" followed by "/", I get the automatic completion
of the end tag (without having to type anything else). So, if I type the
six characters "<", "a", ">", "x", "<", "/" I want the output to look like:
<a>x</a>
This is exactly what happens when tag insight is turned on.

Go to Options - Preferences - Editor / Tag Insight / Features, enable Close the inserted element and then disable Use Tag Insight. After that you can just type <, a, > and auto-completion will add </a> and will place the caret between <a> and </a>, then type x.

Best regards,
Sorin

There must be something I am saying that is confusing you.

I do NOT want the system to add a closing tag and leave the cursor
between the two tags. I simply want </ to close the currently-outstanding
tag.

Doing what you suggest (which doesn't work anyway, turning off Tag
Insight does exactly that - it turns everything off) makes more work - not less.

Consider this. I have a block of text and I want to add tags <something>
and </something> arround it. With your technique I would have to type all of this:

<something>
delete (12 times)
move past my text
</something>

At the moment I get the behaviour I want BUT with POP-UPS!!!!!

I just want to get rid of these irritating pop-ups and changing NOTHING ELSE!

PeterRobertson wrote:Doing what you suggest (which doesn't work anyway, turning off Tag Insight does exactly that - it turns everything off)

Sure it works the way I said it works. I tested that in <oXygen/> release 6 - enable Close the inserted element and, as I said, only after that disable Use Tag Insight.

PeterRobertson wrote:Consider this. I have a block of text and I want to add tags <something> and </something> arround it.

That is another matter. You did not say before that the text is already present in the editor panel and you want to enclose it with a tag. To surround existing text with a tag just select it and use the action Surround with tag (available in the Document - XML Refactoring menu and the contextual menu of the editor panel), having a configurable keyboard shortcut (Options - Preferences - Menu shortcut keys) and documented in the user manual:

http://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/ug-oxygen/ ... ng-actions

PeterRobertson wrote:I just want to get rid of these irritating pop-ups and changing NOTHING ELSE!

Many users find these pop-ups very helpful. The content completion assistant is designed to assist you and speed up editing and is one of the most advanced (some say it is the most advanced) on the market of XML integrated development environments. If you disable it you are instructing <oXygen/> to let you handle content completion, so it is impossible to "change nothing else". Will you help us improve <oXygen/>'s content completion by providing more details about why the pop-ups are irritating ?

Best regards,
Sorin

I have reverted to verison 5.1 following problems with V6; your
suggestion does not work in version 5.1.

I am converting a very large document to use XML. It is impractical to
select the complete body of text that will be enclosed in tags, as this
would involve repeatedly moving the cursor backwards and forwards
over several lines or pages.

I believe all my explanations were perfectly clear; I stated exactly what I
wanted to do.

Any potential benefit of pop-ups must ultimately depend on the user; I
find they slow me down considerably. If you look at my previous
message, I list three ways in which the pop-ups are detrimental to my
productivity, which I'll repeat here:
1: They get in the way;
2: They don't go away without either typing blind (they obscure the
place I'm typing) or clicking all over the place;
3: They seem to be so slow that they catch input keystrokes,
resulting in unwanted tags being inserted. For example, I am forever
getting <abbrev> inserted.

I (and many others I suspect) actually like the way this is handled by default in oXygen.

Why would you post this as an issue, since it's working as designed.

Wouldn't it be better to post your "issue" as a feature request, since you're actually asking for an enhancement or change to the product?

-David

I was originally asking if something could be done (disabling pop-ups).
Rather than being told "It's not possible", I was given suggestions that
didn't work (in the verison I'm using), or didn't actually address my
question.

It is possible that the way things are done is appropriate for creating
completely new documents. I have found it to be most inconvenient for
modifying existing, non-trivial documents.

I find I have three possibilities:

1: type extremely slowly to avoid hitting the pop-ups and inserting wrong
tags (usually <abbrev>);
2: live with it - and waste time tidying up the mess it regularly generates;
or
3: disable it totally, in which case I've spent a lot of money on a simple
text editor with fewer useful features than others on my system.

PeterRobertson wrote:1: type extremely slowly to avoid hitting the pop-ups and inserting wrong
tags (usually <abbrev>);
2: live with it - and waste time tidying up the mess it regularly generates;
or
3: disable it totally, in which case I've spent a lot of money on a simple
text editor with fewer useful features than others on my system.

As for 1, I can only say that even on a lowly G4 1.2GHz iBook, I don't have to type slowly.

As for the others, I regularly convert large text documents to DocBook XML. I'm honestly not seeing the issues you are, nor do I find it to be particularly difficult to accomplish in oXygen. I make heavy use of a combination of highlighting and Apple-E (ALT-E on Win?) to wrap the highlighted areas in a particular tag.

I take it what you want to happen is to simply be able to type your opening tag, then go somewhere else in the document and close the tag without highlighting and without getting the completion dialog.

-David

I can only comment on my experience.

As for 1, I can only say that even on a lowly G4 1.2GHz iBook, I
don't have to type slowly.

If you believe that I shouldn't be getting the problems I do, I would
appreciate your suggesting some clue as to why my documents get
littered with <abbrev> tags.

I take it what you want to happen is to simply be able to type
your opening tag...

In essence, yes. I work sequentially through documents. My style of
working would be severely impaired if I had to keep going backwards
and forwards over blocks of text. Auto-completion of tags is very helpful,
as it gives confirmation that I am where I expect to be. This is crucial as
the only errors I get during transformation are of the form "something
went wrong". I do not believe the DTD mechanism to a practical way of
checking (possibly through ignorance, but the reasons are not relevant
here).

Hello,

PeterRobertson wrote:I have a block of text and I want to add tags <something>
and </something> arround it. With your technique I would have to type all of this:

Code: Select all

<something>

delete (12 times)

move past my text

</something>

At the moment I get the behaviour I want BUT with POP-UPS!!!!!

I just want to get rid of these irritating pop-ups and changing NOTHING ELSE!

In a future version we will add the enhancement: type <something> in front of the block of text, the closing tag is not inserted automatically, type </ after the block of text, something> is added automatically without popups. The user will configure the behavior with an option from Preferences/Tag Insight/Features.

Best regards,
Sorin

Just a quick comment... when you start typing in a tag and you get the tag pop-up, just press Esc and the pop-up goes away. You can keep typing in the rest of the tag you're trying to manually enter (works for me on Linux with Oxygen6).