tags and buddies

[Maximilian Güntner]

2013/11/7 Dirk Hohndel <dirk at hohndel.org>:
> one thing that would be really cool to have would be to replace the
> current "text edit" line with buddies with the same tag editing logic.
> i.e. consider each buddy simply a tag and show them as such.
>
> is that something reasonably easy to do?

The structure behind the tagging system can be easily applied to other
attributes as well. There are only some minor changes that need to be made.

> <buddy>Anna Maria, Josephine and Carla</buddy>
>
> Those should turn into the tags "Anna Maria", "Josephine", "Carla"
> Kinda obvious to the human reader, but hard for an algorithm (especially
> when you think about the user using their native language word for
> "and").

We could write a parser for such strings that replaces "and", "with",
'/', '&' by ',' and then loads the resulting text into the data structure.
Of course we can also replace every translation of "and" and "with"
(of languages
subsurface has been translated to).

> And of course, some people may have used space to separate their buddies
> before ("Anna Maria Josephine Carla" being FOUR buddies).
If there are no commas/"and"/"with" in the input string we can simply
use white spaces
as delimiters.

The biggest problem is that everything we cannot transform properly to
a comma separated format
needs to be updated by the user, which currently is not easy since
tags/buddies are not searchable.

Maybe some users used more prepositions to describe buddy teams like

<buddy>Anna Maria with me; Josephine together with Carla</buddy>

which would be lost/destroyed during the conversion. Also, such a notation is
currently not possible with the tag system.

> So I'm not sure what to do about input / conversion, but I know that
> lots of people will like the ability to have "per-buddy" autocompletion.
Indeed, I also think that is something many users will appreciate.

Maximilian