(Archived) Web Clipper bug: suggested tag text is a bit screwed up

[gotofritz 21]

This has always been an issue in every version of the web clipper I have used on OSX, for both FF and Chrome, but I could never be bothered to post a report because it's quite long and difficult to explain.

Let's say I have many tags, including one called 'evernote' and on called 'agile'. In the web clipper I type 'e' - because 'e' is matched in agile, the first suggestion is 'agile'. In the tag text I then have 'egile' - i.e. the letters I have typed so far are in the wrong position (always at the start of the word). If I click 'return' then the clipper doesn't replace the word with the suggestion, it goes off and clips the url with the unfinished tag.

The web clipper only matches contiguos letters. So 'evernote' is matched by e, 'r' 'rnote', 'o' etc, but not by 'vrn'for example. I am not entirely sure why you bother with matching letters that are not at the beginning of a word. Either I type 'a' for 'agile' and 'e' 'ev' or 'eve' for evernote, or you allow me to type 'agl' for 'agile' and 'vrn' for evernote. Why would I want to type 'e' for 'agile'?

To speak tekkie, given that the webclipper is javascript, it looks to me as if your coder has forgotten the caret to anchor the RegExp at the beginning of the string.

inputField.onchange= function(){new RegExp( "^" + this.value ); //etc

Although the better solution would be

inputField.onchange= function(){new RegExp( this.value.split( "" ).join( ".*" ) ); //etc

[jefito 5,589]

I think that that is by design. That they do internal matching in that scenario is OK by me, sometimes the exact tag might not be so apparent. On the other hand, I would prefer that exact matches for tag prefixes be sorted to the top of the list first; the rest can follow (I think I've posted about this before).

[gotofritz 21]

Well if it is by design it is badly designed. I can see the benefit in leting you pick a random sequence of character as a shortcut - say 'v' 'r' n' for 'evernote'. Quicksilver, an app launcher for the OS X, does that and it works quite well. But why match a substring in the middle of another? Who would type 'ote' to match 'evernote'?

I agree with you though, at the very least they should change the order of the matches

[jefito 5,589]

If you have lots and lots of tags, or a complicated tagging system, you might benefit from this behavior. I use partial internal matching a fair amount in development tasks (oh, that elusive variable name), but not so much with Evernote, though (I don't have a lot of tags).

[gotofritz 21]

OK, not convinced but fair enough. That's a side issue though.

The main problem, and that is a bug, is that it inserts suggested tags incorrectly. If you type 'o' and the first suggestion is 'evernote', you will end up with 'overnote' as it always treats whatever you typed as the beginning of the string. That is plainly wrong.

[jefito 5,589]

Yeah, I think that that's not as smoothly handled as it might be; a similar function, typing into Chrome's search/URL control doesn't add the unmatched, highlighted text after what you've typed. The Evernote behavior allows you to create a new tag when you didn't mean to.