Type-ahead find

[Arend van Beelen jr.]

On Friday 19 March 2004 16:32, George Staikos wrote:
>    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.
I think this is indeed a good idea which will keep all current users happy :)

> > - 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.
This one doesn't seem very logical to me. It would be much more intuitive to 
use F3 just like the regular Search Next. Furthermore, using "n" has a 
disadvantage where you need to exit type-ahead first, either by pressing 
Escape or waiting 3 seconds. Being able to immediately press F3 just makes 
more sense IMHO.

> > - 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. :-)
Well, I surely want both modes (full text search if you press /, links search 
if you press ' ). Limiting yourself to links is very useful if you're using 
type-ahead find for navigation rather than just searching.

-- 
Arend van Beelen jr.
http://www.liacs.nl/~dvbeelen

Why wait for hell if you can grab it all today?
-- Xynobite