Enhancements to the "History" view/selector

[mandx]

• Some small help/intro text? Anyone should be able to eventually figure out how to use this "History view", but it still not obvious the first time this view pops out.
• When you finally get how to use the History view, it's definitely intuitive to use; the thing is most of the time users will be selecting "ranges" of history items. That's the flow that would need some enhancing. For instance, now I lookup the first import line (press Up until the cursor is at that line) then select those lines (keep Space pressed) carefully not to select an unwanted line. For example (just a idea) how about showing line numbers instead of asterisks (*) at the beginning of each history line (a regular REPL sessions has line numbers anyway, so the concept is not extraneous) then add some command line prompt at the bottom, with commands to quickly jump to line number, select all lines from number to number, select all lines from current position to number, etc...

[jonathanslenders]

Thank you! This is very valuable feedback.

[amjith]

Little bit more feedback.

• How about keeping the history browser open permanently while typing queries in the repl? (Of course there will be an option to toggle the history browser on/off). Right now when the history browser is open I can't type anything in the repl.
• If you allow the history browser to be kept open at all times, it'll be useful to allow the users to choose whether to keep the history browser as a vertical split or a horizontal split.
• Make the selected entries much more obvious. A couple of ideas here:
  1. List the history items with a [ ] next to it. When a history item is selected place a * in that box. Like [*].
  2. Highlight the whole entry when an item is selected. This might be a bit heavy handed.
• Up/Down arrows are the only allowed keys in the history browser, so why not make pressing any other key automatically search the list. For example, if I'm pressing up/down, choose the entry one at a time. If I start to type imp narrow down the list to match lines that have the word imp. That way a user doesn't have to trigger search keybinding explicitly such as C-s in Emacs or / in Vi mode.

[mixmastamyk]

Very hard to exit history, kept hitting keys like ESC etc, nothing happened. No help from status bar.

Remembered I got there thru F3 and hit it again to finally exit. (unintuitive :)

[garettmd]

I like the proposal by @mandx. Although I think I'd go a step further, and simply add vi/emacs keybindings to the history pane, just like you can use in the REPL. This would add a ton of power to it.