The AutoComplete plugin eliminates the pain of typing a long url, by automatically looking up the typed string in the persistent history, and filling in the edit field with the typed string plus matching bits. 

Version 0.1.5a (the fourth public release) of the AutoComplete OmniWeb plugin (for users of OmniWeb 3.0 (from Omni Development Inc.) for OPENSTEP 4.2 and Mac OS X Server) is available.

To obtain the latest version of this plugin, proceed to http://www.pobox.com/~jamacht/PlugIns. The current version for OPENSTEP is compiled for NeXT, Intel, and SPARC platforms, but is only tested on Intel. The current version for Mac OS X Server is compiled and tested for PowerPC.

To enable the AutoComplete plugin, copy AutoComplete.plugin to a directory on the OmniWeb plugin path, which includes ~/Library/PlugIns on OPENSTEP and Mac OS X Server, /LocalLibrary/PlugIns for OPENSTEP, or /Local/Library/PlugIns for Mac OS X Server.

Preferences Panel
================= 

You can use the preferences panel in the user preferences window to control the behavior of the plugin.

 If you want to search only at the beginning of word breaks, you can turn that on by checking "Match Only At Word Boundaries". This will tell the plugin that when you type "step" to match "http://www.stepwise.com", but not "http://www.nextstep.com", if you've been to both of those sites before.

 You can tell the plugin to compare the string you've typed only with the hostname part of sites you've been to. So if you type "john", the plugin will complete to "http://www.johnspage.com" but not "http://www.mysite.org/unclejohnspage".

 If you're finding that you're waiting for the completion to actually happen, you may have too many items in your history. In that case, you can enable lookups in a cached history by selecting the "Enable Fast Lookups" select box. This will also have the side effect of matching only those sites you had already been to at the launch of OmniWeb, that is, those sites that were saved when you last quit OmniWeb. It doesn't affect the operation of the Persistent History panel in any way,  and if you visit a new site, it will show up in the Persistent History panel immediately; however, you will not be able to match this site using the AutoComplete functionality until you restart OmniWeb.

 Also, you can disable the functionality of the plugin completely by unchecking the "AutoComplete Enabled" button.

Known Bugs
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 The matching process is still very slow if you have many (>2000-3000) items in your persistent history. This is partially solved by the "Enable Fast Lookups" checkbox, but since this option affects the plugin's operation, I still consider it a bug.

Hints and Tips

- You don't have to type the "http://www" part of a url if you don't want to. This plugin completes anywhere in the url if you want to. For instance, if you've been to a site "http://www.smpte.org/info/timecode", you can type any of "timecode", "smpte", or any other substring in the url to match it. The only situation any of those strings will not match the url is if you have the "Match Only in Hostname" option checked, or if you have been to more than one unique site matching that string.


Feedback about functionality and bugs is appreciated at: jamacht@pobox.com

The AutoComplete plugin is Copyright 1998-1999 by Jeff Macht. All rights reserved. No warranties. No commercial distribution of any kind allowed without consent. 
