increasing the usability of search dialogs

[Frans Englich]

On Tuesday 16 May 2006 10:41, Thomas Zander wrote:
> On Tuesday 16 May 2006 11:19, Luciano Montanaro wrote:
> > Actually, I would want them on all the time, if the program can hadle
> > them. They don't really get in my way most of the time--like when
> > searching for a particular word. And they are really useful to search
> > for well, regular expression, like "chapter [0-9]+". I'm not sure Qt
> > regexps handle that, but with vi(m) I can decide if I want to search
> > for whole words, or case-sensitive/insensitive etc.
>
> The majority of the people that use KDE will not know what a regular
> expression is, let alone use it.
> In KWord we provide the kregexpeditor which helps, but does not change the
> fact that its a feature only used by a tiny part of the users.
>
> For that reason I'm more inclined to have it hidden by default, there are
> nice collapsible panels for stuff like that proposed by the usability
> people.

FWIW, this kind of mentality fully has my vote. I think it's badly missing. 
That we target the users of our applications, instead of thinking that the 
developers of the applications is the typical users. RegExp support in the 
middle of a for-mortals application, is probably one of the best examples.


Cheers,

		Frans