6 ms·
> You see, there’s more than one way that people expect type-to-search to work. In one pattern, you type the first letter of the thing you want, and the system
by jstanley 3y ago
> You see, there’s more than one way that people expect type-to-search to work. In one pattern, you type the first letter of the thing you want, and the system finds the first item that starts with that letter. If that’s not the one you want, you press that same letter again, and the system finds the second item that starts with that letter. Keep pressing that same letter until you get to the item you want.
What! This is crazy! There can't be that many people who expect type-to-search to work that way.
- bradrn 3y agoHow is it crazy? This behaviour always made sense to me.
- canucker2016 3y agoI'm basing the listview behaviour based on how I interpret the article. Suppose you have a list: - jaguar - llama - lorax - manatee Typing 'l' should position the cursor on 'llama'. Typing another 'l' would signal that you want the next 'l' element and move the cursor to 'lorax'. To correct the position, you'd either have to hit backspace to go to the first 'l' item, press 'a' to move to the first 'lla' item (I'd hope... but if the control went to the first 'la' item - ignoring the second 'l' I typed, then I'd say the control has gone out of the ballpark) Or maybe the user moves the cursor with one of the cursor keys to position the cursor on the desired item.
- AlienRobot 3y agoIn theory, if you have a folder with every files that have every two-letter combination at the start, there will be 650 files with distinct letters and only 26 files that have the same first letter and same second letter. In practice, the amount of actual words that have the same first letter as the second letter is minuscule. Even words that have the same letter appearing twice in sequence. It's just optimized for the most convenient scenario.
- jodrellblank 3y ago> "In practice, the amount of actual words that have the same first letter as the second letter is minuscule." In the enable1.txt wordlist of 172,823 English words, there are 126 starting with a double letter, and those are largely the variations of oohs, aahs, oomphs, oozes, aardvarks, eels, eerinesses, and oodles of oocytes, oolites, oophytes and oologists near oomiaks.
- netsharc 3y ago> To correct the position, you'd either have to [...] press 'a' to move to the first 'lla' item Tested with some text files on Windows Explorer on Win11, typing lla actually moves from llama, to lorax and back to llama. I also put alpha on the list to see if it would jump to that, but it didn't.
- trynumber9 3y agoIt's selection, not a filter. Works in dropdown lists too and across multiple operating systems.
- hornban 3y agoThe primary situation where I find this behavior useful is on the web where I find Country drop-down lists. I am trying to find United States. It could be "United States", "USA", "U.S.A.", "United States of America", etc. All you have to do is keep pressing "U" until you find the match you want. It really helps when the desired match could be formatted several different ways. That assumes, of course, that the website isn't using some ridiculous drop-down component that doesn't support keyboard interaction or tab handling. Sadly, that's about 50/50 these days.
- Macha 3y agoOnly if it's a shared beginning. It's a little less useful when you're searching for Ireland, Republic of Ireland, or occasionally Éire.
- red_admiral 3y agoOr if I'm not sure whether the box uses England, United Kingdom, UK, Great Britain, GB, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (yes I've seen this spelled out once). Sigh.
- sph 3y agoYou forgot "Britain". So it's unclear whether we should look for words starting with B, E, G or U. And there's also the case of dropdowns putting some most frequent countries at the top, so you spend ages scrolling to find the correct spelling, when listed above "Afghanistan". Also fun when you're given flag emojis to choose from, sorted by country name, and you don't know which of UK/GB/EN they have used to sort with, and whether you should look for St. George's cross or the Union Jack.
- eddd-ddde 3y agoI have always used select dropdowns as a regular text input. I just type the thing I want until it appears on my cursor and I press enter. Never imagined repeated presses would toggle results.
- 3y ago
- hnthrowaway0328 3y agoActually that's the most sane way for countries sorted by alphabet. Since I live in Canada I always expect CCC...until I hit one.
- salgernon 3y agoIn a list of "Countries by alphabetical order", I see: - Cabo Verde - Cambodia - Cameroon - Canada So if you were typing 'can' instead, you would always be correct (today) even if one of the earlier ones were removed.
- mewpmewp2 3y agoYeah, Canada seems easy to me. United States of America, I could relate to due to so many different ways of writing it.
- eviks 3y agoThat only works because for the country list you have no conflicting repeated keys like "ll" going to "lemur" instead of "llama"
- layer8 3y agoAnd that's the overwhelming majority of cases. Wanting to select an item starting with the same letter repeated twice is rare. It makes sense to speed up common cases at the expense of rare cases.
- eviks 3y agoNot really since those rare cases are more memorable, so in addition to other UI elements having different behavior (though I admit this is the much bigger factor) you don't treat this as a reliable mechanism for search. So you'll just enter the next letter as you do everywhere else, and your frequency balance changes And it especially doesn't make sense for such an long-standing core UI toolkit to not have these kinks ironed out. These behaviours are already handicapped by their obscurity, no reason to make them behave counterintuitively on top of that
- salgernon 3y agoBack in 1991 I was at Sun and tasked with implementing type-to-complete for file dialogs in OpenWindows. Coming from a Mac background, I naturally implemented... type to complete. But the OpenWindows Spec declared it should be "first letter, keep typing first letter". That method requires you to very explicitly look at what is selected each time you press 'B', as opposed to just typing 'bagend' or 'bilbo'. Maybe it makes sense if you can't type? In any case, I added a secret preference to do it the right way, and then quit. Imagine if the web browser incremental search worked that way...
- canucker2016 3y agoI agree. That's the behaviour that I programmed for the listbox in the Address Book for Microsoft's email product, which you should see in MS Outlook (they might have changed the behaviour since then). The main difference for that address listbox versus most listboxes/listviews is that the address listbox will update the display to show the sublist of matching items (and do the hard work of updating the scrollbar to show the size of this sublist and how many items are in view). The expectation was the user would move the cursor with arrow keys or type more or the desired substring if the cursor wasn't placed on the desired item.
- pradn 3y ago> In any case, I added a secret preference to do it the right way It's harder to do these sort of guerrilla things when every line is code-reviewed. Or maybe you snuck it past your peer?
- salgernon 3y agoThere wasn't a lot of code review going around our group in 1991 - but you're absolutely right that it would be harder to get away with today. There are a lot of hidden knobs in various places across various systems, and they are a potential liability since they're frequently untested and may even be a vector for an exploit... sudo dtrace -qn 'pid$target::getenv:entry { printf("getenv ( %s )\n", copyinstr(arg0)); }' -c "/bin/ls -l"
- layer8 3y ago
- esafak 3y agoI think the up/down keys make more sense here, since they can't be mistaken for search characters.
- AlienRobot 3y agoI expect it to work that way. That's the way I grew up with. It's faster than pressing a letter then pressing down. It's a skip-to-item function to not a search function ARE YOU HEARING ME NAUTILUS
- Terr_ 3y agoIMO it all hinges on whether the UI offers somewhere for the user to iteratively construct (and view) a "current search string". If the user can press "c","a","t" and see "cat" somewhere, then it makes sense that the "catapult" is selected, and that typing "t" might to go "cattle". However if you don't have that meta-state and a way to display it, then each individual keypress becomes a matter of picking a new selection based on the current selection. Hence the ruleset of "if the selected item starts with the same letter, go to the next item with the same starting letter, otherwise go to the first item that starts with the letter."
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoIn Chen's example, the ruleset is not what you've described here. It is: if the selected item starts with the same letter, go to the next item with the same starting letter, otherwise go to the first item whose spelling matches the letters given so far." That's why you can match llama by typing "lla"
- numpad0 3y agoThis sounds completely reasonable, but this is also the first time I've seen it described as a search. Windows File Explorer works this way.
- eviks 3y agoit's not reasonable for "ll" not to select "llama", but something else because of some invisible mode switch, that's just bad/confusing UI with inaccessibl rules in big lists (because you'd expect the user to hold the whole post-prefix word list in his head and be able to do this calculations in real time to understand what to expect) Of course, you can still keep both with a fix to this issue unless there is some other more intricate one
- layer8 3y agoI'm annoyed whenever I'm in a list view and either the first or the second mode doesn't work. That's how useful both of them are. Usefulness trumps minor inconsistencies. The first mode is also crucial for menus.
- Waterluvian 3y agoBecause that’s how previous Windows did it! So there’d be millions trained to expect this behaviour. Developers love to accidentally rug pull on customers by thinking, “there’s no way people would expect it to work that way!”
- uconnectlol 3y agoyou don't expect it to work that way, you discover it. once you discovered it, sometimes you have two files that start with e and you press e to get to the one you want, but it got you to the one before it, so you press e again to go to the next one, which is faster than reaching for the down arrow. being able to select files with finesse is important in windows. windows 9x was probably the last time any user interface tried to be this efficient, now it's just click the arrow and it will make sure to slide the next photo in very slowly in case you forgot that you're waiting for the next photo to appear
- uconnectlol 3y agoanother thing i just remembered like this is how the start menu will fade in in windows XP, and submenus. but after you open one submenu and then decide to open another beside it, it admits that the animation is just a gimmick and doesnt do it again.
- brnt 3y agoIt's how cmd.exe, power shell do auto complete, right? I agree, I find that useless too, but I always assumed since it appears standard in the Windows world it must be what many expect.