> Incremental search as I'm used to the term certainly existed long before and still exists now: did the Cat do something different? Yes, it did. It included t

> Incremental search as I'm used to the term certainly existed long before and still exists now: did the Cat do something different? Yes, it did. It included two functions that significantly change the system's user-friendliness: - Search and navigation was done through quasi-mode interactions, instead as with point-and-click. This gave end-users the powerful keyboard-only navigation capabilities of vi, without all the cognitive load of its navigation&commands mode. - All content in the system was organized as a single infinite stream of text. There were special characters for sections and files, so you could always navigate to the previous/next section or file by leaping to that character. And you could open a section or file by typing the character plus the file name. Several of these conventions have been since adopted by browsers' "smart address bars", allowing users to navigate the web through a limited version of this keyboard-first style. But there is no desktop environment that fully takes advantage of these principles for a general audience. Typically, only some power users benefit from a similar workflow in controlled environments like Emacs, without all the simplicity and gentle learning curve of the Canon Cat.