Sublime Forum

Plugin idea: Feasibility of using writing pattern recognition to provide hints

#1

General idea:
Say the user does not know that basic Convert Case functionality is already built into Sublime Text. The plugin would recognized what the user was trying to do and count the number of times this was done in the past. In this case deleting characters and replacing them with the same but with a different case. If the pattern is recognized multiple times, then a hint would appear: “You’ve done this same exact thing # times before, using [Command Name (Hotkey)] you can save #.# seconds each time.”

But then I thought it might be one of the hardest example to give, as the Plugin would have no connection between letters of different cases. The only way it would give the hint is if there was a lookup database where patterns would be registered and the case of the same exact word matched. Meaning storage and privacy issues ensue. Or just having a separate ‘convert case’ pattern recognizer?

An easier example would be the usual wrapping of words with parenthesis, apostrophes or something else. Or writing something that already has a Snippet.

Do you think I going too far out and this is actually Deep Learning AI territory?

I might be simply nostalgic for something:

1 Like
#2

Setting aside any technical concerns, I suspect that my reactions of “gee, thanks for the tip!” would be outnumbered by (as you say) “Die in a fire, Clippy!”.

0 Likes
#3

JetBrains tools (e.g. IntelliJ Idea and WebStorm) have something vaguely similar to this, but but not on the level of popping up a balloon to tell you when you could be doing something better (I think; as you can see from the screen shot below it’s been well over two years since I’ve touched IntelliJ so I can’t recall with any certainty).

Instead the core tracks how often you use features that they’ve decided are time savers to try and give you some rough estimate on how much time you’ve saved yourself. I think the idea is that you’re supposed to check in there every now and then and see what cool thing you could be doing that you’re not:

jetbrains_productivity.png861×540 63.1 KB

That said, they can get away with this because their core is extremely vast, and this feature covers just the features that they ship in the core, so the metrics are probably easier to grab.

On the flip side, Sublime has a small tight core and most of what you think of as the default functionality actually comes from python plugins that happen to ship with Sublime but are otherwise indistinguishable from third party plugin code (and in fact you can override shipped functionality if you want to).

I’m certainly not an AI or machine learning expert, but it seems daunting to say the least to have the system be able to capture this kind of information as it would have to basically infer not only patterns in what you’re doing but also what each plugin is actually doing for you as well to be able to know what patterns to even look for.

1 Like