This is definitely half-baked... but I've often though it would be useful to have a context sensitive auto-complete funtion in an Operating System rather than just specific packages.

Typing www.goo into the address bar of Internet Explorer gives me Google right off the bat. This is good.

I have multiple copy-and-pastes in Office 2000+ this is also good.

But better still would be a buffer with all those little snippets of recently typed, searched for and copied sentance fragments. (A bit like a large Recent Documents list or my Browser History for the day)

It doens't even need to be that many, perhaps 100 or so items , but I'd love to be able to be writing something on Buddhism, for example, and then for me to go to Google and it know the last piece of text I wrote... and vice versa. It's be great for Dreamweaver to also know what I've been cutting and searching for too.

I know this is redundant for anyone with half a brain and a reasonably effective short-term memory, but I'm a bit thick and it'd be good to have a global auto-complete to cut-and-paste things for me while I wasn't thinking.
-- mtness, Oct 29 2003

The problem isn't so much in the doing, but rather in the metaphor and UI. How does the program know what belongs in the list? How do you easily retrieve something from the list?
-- phoenix, Oct 29 2003


Wasn't some Apple system (maybe the Newton) supposed to be organized like this, where everything you entered went into some kind of electronic soup? This is a commonly enunciated cyber-goal, whereby everything you do with a computer is automatically catalogued for you for some kind of ready retrieval. But what phoenix said.
-- DrCurry, Oct 29 2003


There are a number of shareware/freeware clipboard enhancements that can do most of this. Basically they keep a arbitrary depth stack of the recent contents of the system clipboard, and give you a UI to access it easily. But of course you have to remember to actually copy each item in, so its not as automatic as what you describe.

Along the same lines, a constant annoyance for me is the fact that Windows maintains a separate "current directory" for each running application. Often I'm using three or more applications to do different parts of the same task, and I end up having to navigate to the same directory umpteen times.
-- krelnik, Oct 29 2003



random, halfbakery