Prompt user again at ambiguos input

[mxmerz]

Take for example the following prompt:

[A]pply, More candidates, Skip, Use as-is, as Tracks, Group albums,
Enter search, enter Id, aBort? 

If I now enter bm and press enter, beets ignores the second character and aborts (b). I would expect beets to ask me again, as it can not be determined if I wanted beets to abort (b) or to show me more candidates (m).

[sampsyo]

Well, the idea here is that you can type the whole word "skip" and beets will happily just take the letter "s". It seems like doing this would require rejecting anything longer than a single character, right?

[mxmerz]

Ah, I didn't think people would actually do that. I guess this does not work with "abort" and "enter id"?

But anyway, even if full words should be accepted as well, things like "bm" or "as" seem ambiguous to me and could be regarded as user error?

[sampsyo]

Hmm—what would the exact rule be? If all the letters are options, then ignore the input?

[Kraymer]

Rather if not (exact match or shorcut letter) then ignore

ie if choices are stored as a dict

choices = {
  'a': 'Apply', 
  'm': 'More candidates',
  's': 'Skip', 
  'u': 'Use as-is', 
  't': 'as Tracks', 
  'g': 'Group albums',
  'e': 'Enter search',
  'i': 'enter Id',
  'b': 'aBort'
}

we would compare input text to keys and values when searching for a choice.

[sampsyo]

I'm still a little unsure about the ergonomics. It would be a shame to prohibit typing "app" to mean "apply", for example. So maybe we need something a bit more sophisticated, like checking for unambiguous prefixes?