Add favorites and node searching to link command window

[hickey]

Describe the request
I am creating this issue to call attention to #285 that I created a bit ago. I noticed that there were a couple of other PRs that have not gone anywhere for about a month and was not sure if the PRs were being watched.

Short summary (more description in #285) is that the link command window will now display a list of favorite nodes to connect to when the selection box is clicked. The user can also enter a search string to search through the entire node database. The favorite list is managed with a new file favorites.ini.

[jxmx]

PR #285 has been reverted because it doesn't work correct and with all of the lint-type cleanups it's impossible to cherry-pick out the real changes vs. unnecessary cleanups. @hickey are you able to provide a new/clean PR with just your proposed changes so we can test and fix?

[jxmx]

@hickey Are you able to provide the clean PR to re-introduce this feature so we can test/debug this?

[hickey]

I don't believe that I have seen the end of line issues resolved in the repo.

As stated in the original PR comment, item 3, leaving white space at the end of lines is just a bad thing to do as it triggers all sorts of false positives in a commit set. If the EOL white spaces were removed (I do believe I had one or two painless ways to do this in the comments), then the PR could be rebased agains the develop branch and then it would only have the lines that I actually touched.

[jxmx]

There is no “end of line issue” that is a material defect in the code. You are describing a personal preference in code formatting and workflow. While in the abstract there are times that it can cause cruft in diff views over time, overall a massive reformat pull is just as disruptive in different ways depending on how you use git and other tools. The ASL practice has been to reformat as you touch the code for other reasons.

[hickey]

(Helps if I don't get pulled off to do something else and actually submit my comment! :-)

It is not a personal preference. Years ago I was oblivious to the problems that trailing white space causes just like you are now. That's why most programming shops and open source projects don't allow trailing white spaces. Introducing them just causes headaches for code reviews (hmmm... sounds vaguely familiar).

Just go Google "source code trailing white space" and your browser will runith over. Here is one such

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-case-against-trailing-whitespace-this-means-space-or-TAB-characters-after-the-last-non-whitespace-character-of-a-line-Is-this-a-measure-for-the-quality-of-the-code-and-the-coder

Certainly there are those out there that are OCD and the trailing white space drives them crazy, but this is much more practical than that and is very pragmatic.

[jxmx]

I'm not "oblivious" to these supposed problems; I just don't care about them and don't deem them as problems. I care much more about a different set of annoyances that come from pull requests are opened with tons of meaningless whitespace changes splatted in them because some has a different preference for code formatting or from trying to enforce an unimportant coding standard. It causes more work for everyone in the long run.

If this pull request had originally been the functional changes to the code and not intermixed with a ton of chaff, this feature would have been pulled, tested, and released by now.

[jxmx]

Please open a new PR for your favorites code and let's see where we stand.