Tab Completion in the Debugger

There’s a handy tab completion feature in the OpenLaszlo debugger now. It’s been around for a few months, but I’ve avoided using it mainly because the keyboard focus was a little flaky on my old Windows laptop.

It works just like a typical Unix (say bash) shell:

  1. Recompile your application with the debugger. e.g. browse to the Hello, World! example with ?debug=true.
  2. Click on the Debugger text input field, and begin typing. e.g. can
  3. Hit tab. The Debugger should complete the word “canvas”.
  4. Now add a dot, and hit tab once. e.g. canvas.
  5. If there are too many possible matches, you’ll see output like the following in the Debugger:
    INFO: 456 possibilities: press ‘\t’ again to see them all
  6. Hit tab again, and you should see a long list of possible properties on canvas:
    INFO: Possible completions: $cfn $isstate $lzc$bind_id $lzc$bind_name …
  7. Now add “sub” to the text input field. It should read canvas.sub
  8. Hit tab. You should see two possible matches for canvas.sub:
    Possible completions: subnodes subviews
  9. Add a “v”, so your text input field now says canvas.subv
  10. Hit tab. The debugger should complete that to canvas.subviews, since its the only possible match. Now hit the enter key, and the Debugger will inspect canvas.subviews.

Enjoy!

One thought on “Tab Completion in the Debugger

  1. Note that this currently only works in the Flash debugger. You can use the up/down arrows to go through the history. For 4.2, we added persistence, so the history is be retained after reloading the page in the browser.

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