Command/action aliases

[brisvag]

In napari/napari#8661 (comment) we discussed the possibility of having some form of command/action aliases (or keywords?) to assign to an action to be used for searching purposes. While we could do that simply with a dictionary, I wonder if this is something useful to have in general? Something like:

class CommandRule:
	...
	aliases: set[str]

So we'd have something like:

Action(..., title='Color Bar', aliases={'Calibration Bar', 'Color Legend'})

Altenratively, is there a simpler way to do something like this so that this info lives on the action rather that in some other third mapping?

[tlambert03]

I wonder if this is something useful to have in general ... rather that in some other third mapping?

honestly, this kinda does feel to me like a third party mapping? I don't have a super-strong opinion, but given that you already have the full command-palette logic implemented in napari, it feels like a natural place for it? If you all very much want it here... then I could be persuaded, but since app-model itself never does anything with it, it feels slightly out of place.

btw... fuzzy search was a part of my original command palette: napari/napari@main...tlambert03:napari:command-pallette ... and in that implementation there, you could add aliases with a couple line addition:

  ALIASES: dict[str, list[str]] = {
      "napari:window:view:toggle_scale_bar": ["calibration bar", "color legend"],
  }

  # at search time, match against title OR any alias
  for alias in ALIASES.get(cmd.id, []):
      if matches_words(query, alias):
          # include this result

not sure if that's compatible with the current command palette?

[brisvag]

Yeah that's the way I was going to go about it :P Makes sense to have it there too, I agree, i just feel it would be nice to define these things directly where the action is defined, for ease of maintenance/contribution. We can always subclass Action and add this field :)