Having different navigation modes boosts the keyboard productiveness but makes the shorcuts less intuitive. So, when I first searched something, and found it, I expected that pressing Control+Down would take me to the immediately next translation, not to the next match. And, as a GNOME user, I thought Control+F would take me to the search bar (instead of F3), and that I would navigate the search matches pressing Control+G (forward) and Control+Shift+G (backwards). Using Enter to go back from the search bar to the translations was not intuitive, but it doesn’t really hurt, because pressing Tab (which I guessed) works.

“incomplete” mode is very useful. If you ever kill the modes and create a separate shortcut for it, please don’t create many different shortcuts like some applications; just one for untranslated+fuzzy forward, and another for backwards.

Once I read the “getting started”, the navigation modes because very usable. Maybe it’s just a matter of somehow telling new users that there are navigation modes. A fat tooltip is clearly a good call, and maybe changing the “_Mode” label for “_Navigation mode: ” (another trade-off between designing for beginners or familiarized users). Maybe the help menu could have a separate, off-line, “Getting started” item.

Somehow, I managed to autocomplete words with every reasonable key, except for Tab But I guess that’s just me, I believe Tab is a good key for… “tab completion”.

On what would I need:

• Currently the autocorrection is not working well for me; when I type fast (even if correctly) it seems to be activated before I end typing the word. I really need this to be fixed (or optional) for Virtaal to become an everyday tool.
• Search and replace will be very useful for someone who reviews more than translates (e.g. me). Searchs with regular expression can be crafted to deal with underscores, ampersands and other access key signs, but maybe the usual (non-regex) search should ignore those characters; e.g. searching for “ajuda” should match “aj_uda” as well by default.
• If, by any chance, you can make the spell checker understand “aj_uda” as “ajuda”, that would be great.
• Consider printing non-printable characters, like Draw Spaces plugin for Gedit (and the future Gtranslator 2.0). That would help preventing translators from not forgeting trailing or initial whitespace.

Of course there are many missing features, but those are the ones I miss more, after using Virtaal only for a few hours.

Very soon we will work on extending the search feature with replace functionality, and look at how to incorporate translation memory in the most useful/productive way for translators.