Theia: [proposal] [commands] add descriptions, owner to commands

[vince-fugnitto]

As a user sometimes I'd like to know a short description of what a command does, and potentially it's owner. A few things I've considered are:

1. Updating the quick-open-command-palette to add both short descriptions, and owners.
This can be handled through a preference to set the verbosity of the commands to tailor to all different types of users (ex: Only Label, Only Label and Owner, Only Label and Description, All 3)

2. Update the keyboard-shortcuts widget to add a description of a command and any other details through a pop-over. Downside is that a user may not think to look in this widget to see command details.

3. Create a new widget called commands-view which shows all available commands and their details.

The main purpose is to have more transparently to end users of what commands do, where they come from, and how to use them.

[elaihau]

Looks nice. As a user I would know what commands I would lose if uninstall an extension.

[benoitf]

are you able to filter in command palette the commands per owner ?

[vince-fugnitto]

@benoitf I haven't done a full implementation as of yet, but I think we can definitely either include the owner/description field as part of our fuzzy-searching, and if we were really adventurous have regexp as part of our searching to search down to specific owners. What do you think? Do you think it'd be useful to filter by owner?

[benoitf]

my usecase was how to quickly see commands of a given owner (owner being for example a theia plug-in or an extension)

[vince-fugnitto]

@benoitf would you be fine with perhaps searching for @theia/debug or @theia/plugin, or would you rather we had a different construct?

I was also thinking of having a command-viewer widget on top of the changes to the quick-open-command-palette to list all commands and their details and have searching and filtering.

[benoitf]

I was most wondering what could be done by user, like using a new hotkey (today we have empty to open files, > to open a command, wondering if with another key it can indicate on which owner we want to filter or if there are other ways)

either doing

in:"then here I have completion for all owners" and then I can type my command name

or if I type the owner name, it filters command by this owner name

> @theia/debug the name of the command

or something else

[vince-fugnitto]

@benoitf I think it'd be a little overkill maybe to implement something so complex, almost to the point of a regexp search. I think the simplest solution would be that the owner field is searchable and if you'd like to search for @theia/debug then that's all that would be searched. We might run the chance of having some additional results due to fuzzy-searching but it'd be minor.

[svenefftinge]

I think we should go with the prefix notation to communicate the 'owner'.
I.e. git: Fetch
We have it some places but not everywhere.

[akosyakov]

• This place is already reserved for rendering key shortcuts.
• Users should not care about implementation details, extensions/plugins. We should prefix with command categories instead, as Sven mentioned in https://github.com/theia-ide/theia/issues/3287#issuecomment-433639535.

[vince-fugnitto]

I can prefix the commands in a similar way as vscode does @svenefftinge @akosyakov
Are you fine with having command descriptions which can be handled through a preference?

[vince-fugnitto]

closing thanks to #3313