Simplifying Autocomplete housekeeping

[Ward Clark]

It's handy when Autocomplete helps me fill in forms, especially my 
numerous email addresses and contact information.

Some time ago I erroneously entered an email address as "ward at jo".  A 
few minutes ago I was sufficiently annoyed at seeing this wrong choice 
in my autocomplete list that I decided to delete it from my 
autocomplete phrases.

Using the Autocomplete preferences for the first time, I immediately 
found opportunities for improving this feature:

1.  Provide a means for alphabetical sorting.  The list appears to be 
sorted by most recently used, which makes locating a specific phrase a 
tedious scan of 1000 lines.

2.  Keep a phrase use count, which could be used for sorting and for 
deciding which phrases to discard when the list reaches the limit.

3.  Provide some means for blocking the recording of autocomplete 
phrases on specific forms.  Quickly scanning my 1000 phrases, I 
estimate that 50 - 90% of the phrases are from Google searches.  
Remembering these seems to simply clutter my list.

4.  Allow specific phrases to be locked in the list so they will not be 
purged when the limit is reached.  This would make lower limits on 
phrases more practical.  For example, I considered dropping my limit to 
100 to avoid collecting clutter.  But that would almost certainly 
discard email addresses that I use infrequently but want to keep.

In the absence of these features, I just cleaned by list by ...

1.  Selecting all the phrases.

2.  Scrolling through the first 50 or so, unselecting about 15 I wanted 
to keep.

3.  Giving up and deleting all the rest.

-- Ward