We need a general picker list macro!

[twMat]

It should be easily to make "picker lists" - click a button, get a dropdown that shows the list of items. Clicking on an item triggers some action, typically set the title value of that item in a field.

For this, we'd need a general "list-picker macro" that takes a filter as input and lists its contents as buttons, via some template!

I think the components are already in the core, but integrated into special picker solutions:

• $:/TagManager (not public) defines the iconEditor (not public)
• $:/core/macros/colour-picker (public) defines colour-picker which features a neat grid display and a wonderful "Recent"(-ly picked) area. But it is totally specialized (including a hard coded list of colour names).
• $:/core/macros/tag-picker (public) This one seems to be the most general one. tag-picker(actions, tagField:"tags", tiddler, tagListFilter:"[tags[]sort[]]")

(more?)

For this to be a viable request, what is missing from the above text?
Do you agree/disagree - why?
Is it "picker list" or "list picker"? Pist licker?

[saqimtiaz]

For this to be a viable request, what is missing from the above text?

Someone willing to implement it, or at least prototype it which would make it easier to ascertain the merits of the request.

Most core contributors are pretty tied up with bigger changes related to v5.4.0 and this would make an excellent choice for a wikitext savvy contributor to step up.

[twMat]

Someone willing to implement it,

OK, I'll ask on the forum.

or at least prototype it which would make it easier to ascertain the merits of the request.

That is something I could do but for this particular idea, isn't the OP clear enough? I could defiitely give more details but I doubt that would bring anything that isn't obvious.

---

[Personal rant about contributing. Feel free to skip.]

If someone is thinking "Hey Mat, why don't you go ahead and contribute PR's instead of requesting stuff!" - that is of course a fair reaction, but I am simply not savvy enough to live up to the core code standards. I mostly trial-and-error hack together stuff. If I made a PR (....and code PRs at github is a topic in itself!) and anyone was at all willing to review my code there, it would be a forever back-and forth (which, besides, in the distant end would still be among 200 other pending PRs).

Instead, my take on me contributing is that I contribute with what I think I'm decent at; Sharing plugins, the occasional doc edits, and I generally help people on the forum and share ideas (like this one) that I believe would be beneficial to the TW project if someone implemented them. In my own view, I contribute more than 99% of the community members, and hope this is appreciated even from those who contribute even more.

[saqimtiaz]

That is something I could do but for this particular idea, isn't the OP clear enough? I could defiitely give more details but I doubt that would bring anything that isn't obvious.

The question in my mind is whether we can come up with enough of a generalized procedure that can be used to replace the three instances of a picker that you have mentioned. The only way to really figure that out is by prototyping it and then assessing how easy it is to use that new procedure to implement the three exisiting UIs. We don't really want to end up in the situation where we can create such a generalized procedure but it is prohibitively complex to use (see keyboard-driven-input for an example where we got this wrong).

[twMat]

The question in my mind is whether we can come up with enough of a generalized procedure that can be used to replace the three instances of a picker that you have mentioned.

Aha, but that is not necessary! IMO we need a general list picker macro. If it is possible to then use it for the three other cases, then that's great - and it is great even if it is possible to unly use in some of those cases. To replace those other macros with the general one can be a longer term ambition and then we'd probably have a much better understanding of what it would take than if creating a mockup at this stage. I'm sorry if my OP implied that the requested general solution should directly replace the three examples given.

Thanks for your input!