Type-ahead find

[George Staikos]

On Friday 19 March 2004 10:23, Arend van Beelen jr. wrote:
> I've made a little patch that implements type-ahead find in KHTML. I didn't
> want to put it in CVS right away as there are still some issues I would
> like some help and feedback with:
>
> - KHTML uses the H, J, K and L keys for scrolling, just like vi. Also the
> space key is used to scroll down. These keys will undoubtly interfere with
> type-ahead find. Right now you can disable type-ahead find by defining
> KHTML_NO_TYPE_AHEAD_FIND, but I guess some dynamic switch would be needed
> if the patch goes in for people who really like the vi keys.

   I would love to see this patch in CVS when it's stable.  Regarding this 
semantic problem, I think having a state that is entered or exitted to 
trigger typeahead is ideal.  In fact, I like the vim approach, though emacs 
users will undoubtedly want their own keybinding.  Basically I was thinking 
of something like this:

Type '/'
visual cue appears - perhaps a statusbar extension icon or even just a status 
message
typeahead is active and overrides vim navigation keys, etc
enter/escape exit this mode.

> - Pressing F3 won't find the next occurrence of the string you're searching
> for. Now this is related to the functions findTextBegin() and the old
> findTextNext() I use. Can someone explain how I use the new API which
> (hopefully) gets the F3 key to work. (Btw, this problem affects my Google
> search bar as well)

  You could bind "n" to do that when type-ahead mode is inactive.

> - Currently, the patch will search all text. However, the type-ahead find
> in Mozilla by default limits itself to links, which is a good idea I think.
> I'm afraid some extension to the search functions would be needed to
> support this. Any idea's?

  Full text is more useful if you ask me.  Just don't search tags, attributes, 
scripts, and stylesheets. :-)

-- 
George Staikos
KDE Developer				http://www.kde.org/
Staikos Computing Services Inc.		http://www.staikos.net/