> 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.
The 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.
Because 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!”
I 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
Back 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...
IMO 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."
you 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
It'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.
These are the little things you don't notice but make a difference.
It's a pity this kind of attention to detail is becoming obsolete in favor of flashy but unconvenient UI
I expect this behaviour on any list I find in a Windows app. I also expect keystroke consistency, like press F2 to edit... but all this UI things seems old fashioned.
I assume I don't get that on web apps, but "modern" Windows Apps are also deprecating these conveniences
I wonder if in the apple sphere they're suffering this kind of degradation.
The best example of this decline comes from Microsoft itself.
Here is how Microsoft recommends you do find-and-replace in their simple user-friendly ~20 year old note-taking app, OneNote [0]:
1. On a blank page, type the replacement text to use, or find it on a page.
2. Select the replacement text, and press Ctrl+C (⌘+C on Mac) to copy it to the clipboard.
3. Press Ctrl+F (⌘+F on Mac) to find on page, or Ctrl+E (⌘ + Option + F on Mac) search all open notebooks.
4. In the search box on the top left for Windows, top right for Mac, type the text to find.
5. In Windows, you can select Pin Search Results at the bottom of the results list, or press Alt+O to pin the list. Mac is already pinned.
6. In the Search Results pane on the side of your window, select a search result (a text link next to a page icon) to jump to the page where OneNote has highlighted the text it has found.
7. On the page, double-click or select each highlighted occurrence of the text, and press Ctrl+V (⌘ + V on Mac) to paste your replacement text over it.
Note: When you replace a word or phrase in a sentence, you might need to type a space after the new text is pasted.
8. Repeat steps 6-7 for each additional page in the search results list.
Tip: If you've got a lot of replacements on a single page, copy your text to Word, find and replace the text, and then paste back into OneNote.
Definitely, it’s an industry-wide ailment caused by a focus on the web and neophyte users.
The irony is that this power user functionality didn’t impede new users, it’s just been gradually forgotten by folks only raised on the web, where almost everything had to be reimplemented from scratch.
Because most of the time you didn't have to implement this. The UI toolkit implemented this. When you have to do everything from scratch, most people don't.
Take a simple link navbar with a menu of links on a webpage. This has existed since forever. It should be that you can open the menu with your keyboard and use up/down to navigate it. But that means writing JS code. So devs who did it from scratch didn't do it, and only those who used an UI library with that already programmed in by someone else got it.
I agree. I'm writing a desktop app based on a web stack and I'm agonizing over tiny details in how tabbing should work and how the arrow keys should interact with lists etc. I don't know if my UI is any good, but I know that good UI takes a tremendous amount of attention to detail.
Is there a repository somewhere that documents these nuanced interactions? What annoys me when I'm developing native UI is I'm never sure my custom controls are capturing these nuanced behaviors. I shouldn't have to reverse engineer them through trial and error. There are Human Interface Guidelines provided by Microsoft, Apple, GNOME, etc. but they do not document these little behaviors.
Not that I'm aware of, but the underlying point here is you shouldn't be creating custom controls to begin with, if you can at all help it. Not only do you miss our on stuff like this that's currently handled, but you miss out on future improvements you couldn't possibly know about beforehand.
I've seen projects trying to document a few of these UI patterns for the web, including how to build controls that are also accessible. I don't have any links on me at the moment though. It would be really nice if someone took all of these details and documented them carefully in a single Wiki-style site.
One annoyance with incremental search in file views is that if you press the wrong key, you have to wait some time to begin typing again from the beginning, unless you press Esc to clear the search history... except in file picker dialogs, it instead closes the dialog altogether!
are you familiar with the bug or maybe two different ones
where on a save as dialog you rename an unrelated file, then it defaults the save filename to that renamed file, so you change it, and hit save, then it says "this will replace x file"
similarly on that same dialog with deleting the file something similar happens.
I quit using Total Commander because it didn't work like this. This is software that works the way I think. I discovered this feature 30 years ago because I thought that was the way it should work...and it did.
Some people forget or don't realize that Microsoft was pumping out software hand over fist like this, creating UX that flowed when most software worked like Word Perfect and you needed a giant cheat sheet to get anything done.
This is pretty clever but admittedly this type of incremental search was never intuitive to me - I don't like that I can't see the current contents of the search buffer, which is always problematic if I make mistake when searching for something. Give me a textbox and fuzzy search.
Back in the day (1991 or so) during my brief time as a UI person we called the first mode "H for Hawaii" and the second "HAW for Hawaii". We never attempted the "why not both" option.
What are the exact requirements? If we have LLA, and so back in prefix mode, but then type A, are we back in repeated letter mode, where LLAA would want the second item that starts with LLA, if it existed? Are we always back in repeated letter mode if the input terminates with a repeating letter?
As an old geezer, and not necessarily a great fan of everything microsoft does/burns/kills, I witness with sadness how the standards their roman empire helped build and enforce in the 90's, are deteriorating the last 20 years, first on the web outside ms, and since win8, inside their own desktop OS as well.
I dread whenever the windows(?) team/juggernaut updates any of the built-in microsoft system tools (what you might call "options" or "settings" in what is passing for being able to speak and express yourself in these youtube-tiktok-crayon days.)
When I need to get anything done/fixed/working on windows, I first type "control panel", to get the age-old settings UI that was unbroken in win7.
From there, it is still possible (on win10 - I have avoided win11 so far)
to configure most things in a sane way.
Whenever I land on one of the newer tools, they present a mix of
- "you can't/shouldn't view/see that"
- "you should not be able to change that".
- "some settings have been hidden/are managed by your organisation"
When I hit the newer screens,
I cannot see my IP address, I cannot see my DNS providers,
I cannot change my DNS providers, I cannot enable/disable my networks.
Also, to get back on track: Search/incremental keyboard handling/sorting
on lists of stuff is horrendously "I eat crayons, and my product manager eats crayons!" bad.
Some of microsoft's own system list screens
no longer allows you to easily navigate or search your lists.
So you are presented with rubbish like
having to page through () hundreds of items, presented 3 or 5 elements at a time
(really, on a monitor with a resolution exceeding HD??)
A pet rant, truncating list text fields to arbitrary "let's just show the first 16 characters, and then ...", still on the super-HD screen.. sigh.
On some of them, no variant of incremental keyboard search works,
so with the destroyed scrollbars, you are left with manually moving through them.
() assuming the "scroll" interface even allows paging or using the cursor keys..
The modern scrollbar is the crucified victim of what modern crayon-eating humans have lost:
- the size of the scrollbar thumb used to indicate
the size of the list and the page size, so you could feel if
you were scrolling a list of 20.000 or 300 items.
- clicking beside the scrollbar thumb used to jump one page at a time,
possibly with one single item overlap, so you could "tell" that you had jumped an exact page.
- scrollbars used to have little arrows to let you jump 1 item/row at a time.
- scrollbars used to be VISIBLE, so you could orientate yourself in the document
("I see, I am near the bottom of the document/list").
- nowadays, instead, you have to play a mix of "hide the mouse"
and "gee, I wonder if you can spot WHICH rectangles in this window have extra available scrollbars, IF YOU HOVER IN THE RIGHT PLACE?"
Wouldn't it make more sense for the switch to pattern 2 prefix matching to ignore the repeated characters? So if the user typed LLA the prefix matched would be LA (ignore the first L), not LLA.
Obligatory "falsehoods programmers believe about names" comment: in Welsh, "Ll" is technically a single _letter_. It even has its own unicode point, U+1EFA, though I couldn't tell you anyone that actually uses that. Most people just type 'l' twice.
One of the most common place name prefixes is "Llan" which means "church", as in that Llanfair... place with a long name for the tourists.
If you were to load a list of community wards in Wales and type L, that would get you to Laleston (near Bridgend), and typing L again this way would make you step through a few more before the "Llans" start.
Worse still, this way there doesn't seem to be a way to type "Llanberis" (near Snowdonia/Eryri, highly recommended for hiking trips!) because it will interpret the second L as a sign to jump from Laleston to Lampeter, and then the A will put "La" not "Lla" in the box? Or does it remember that you typed "Lla" and fill this in when you press the A key?
EDIT: read it again and this is actually in the last paragraph. It _does_ remember the second L you typed.
The two codepoints U+1EFA (Ỻ) and U+1EFB (ỻ) seem to be intended for Middle Welsh, not modern Welsh. They're marked under the heading "Medievalist additions" in the code chart.
Meanwhile, for the modern Microsoft implementation: Booting up a fresh Windows 10 laptop. It wants me to select my country from the dropdown. I type in the first letter of my country. Nothing happens.
Hooray!
Was it some sort of slow scrolling without arrow keys as well? I vaguely remember a horrible process of finding my country, but I'm not sure if it was Windows Setup.
Visa's exchange rate calculator was similarly annoying – a long list of countries/currencies, but they reimplemented the dropdown control in such a way that typing to jump to the entry I want didn't work. Though at least that one has been fixed recently…
[+] [-] jstanley|1 year ago|reply
What! This is crazy! There can't be that many people who expect type-to-search to work that way.
[+] [-] hornban|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hnthrowaway0328|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Waterluvian|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] AlienRobot|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bradrn|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] salgernon|1 year ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] numpad0|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Terr_|1 year ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] trynumber9|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] esafak|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] uconnectlol|1 year ago|reply
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
[+] [-] brnt|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] _zamorano_|1 year ago|reply
It's a pity this kind of attention to detail is becoming obsolete in favor of flashy but unconvenient UI
I expect this behaviour on any list I find in a Windows app. I also expect keystroke consistency, like press F2 to edit... but all this UI things seems old fashioned.
I assume I don't get that on web apps, but "modern" Windows Apps are also deprecating these conveniences
I wonder if in the apple sphere they're suffering this kind of degradation.
[+] [-] tsimionescu|1 year ago|reply
Here is how Microsoft recommends you do find-and-replace in their simple user-friendly ~20 year old note-taking app, OneNote [0]:
1. On a blank page, type the replacement text to use, or find it on a page.
2. Select the replacement text, and press Ctrl+C (⌘+C on Mac) to copy it to the clipboard.
3. Press Ctrl+F (⌘+F on Mac) to find on page, or Ctrl+E (⌘ + Option + F on Mac) search all open notebooks.
4. In the search box on the top left for Windows, top right for Mac, type the text to find.
5. In Windows, you can select Pin Search Results at the bottom of the results list, or press Alt+O to pin the list. Mac is already pinned.
6. In the Search Results pane on the side of your window, select a search result (a text link next to a page icon) to jump to the page where OneNote has highlighted the text it has found.
7. On the page, double-click or select each highlighted occurrence of the text, and press Ctrl+V (⌘ + V on Mac) to paste your replacement text over it.
Note: When you replace a word or phrase in a sentence, you might need to type a space after the new text is pasted.
8. Repeat steps 6-7 for each additional page in the search results list.
Tip: If you've got a lot of replacements on a single page, copy your text to Word, find and replace the text, and then paste back into OneNote.
[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/find-and-replace-...
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|1 year ago|reply
Definitely, it’s an industry-wide ailment caused by a focus on the web and neophyte users.
The irony is that this power user functionality didn’t impede new users, it’s just been gradually forgotten by folks only raised on the web, where almost everything had to be reimplemented from scratch.
We gained a lot but lost a lot as well.
[+] [-] AlienRobot|1 year ago|reply
Take a simple link navbar with a menu of links on a webpage. This has existed since forever. It should be that you can open the menu with your keyboard and use up/down to navigate it. But that means writing JS code. So devs who did it from scratch didn't do it, and only those who used an UI library with that already programmed in by someone else got it.
[+] [-] cseleborg|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hgs3|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dataflow|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] layer8|1 year ago|reply
Unfortunately there is no user-level documentation.
[+] [-] TheAceOfHearts|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nyanpasu64|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] layer8|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tiptup300|1 year ago|reply
where on a save as dialog you rename an unrelated file, then it defaults the save filename to that renamed file, so you change it, and hit save, then it says "this will replace x file"
similarly on that same dialog with deleting the file something similar happens.
[+] [-] datavirtue|1 year ago|reply
Some people forget or don't realize that Microsoft was pumping out software hand over fist like this, creating UX that flowed when most software worked like Word Perfect and you needed a giant cheat sheet to get anything done.
[+] [-] rkagerer|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rafaelgoncalves|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bool3max|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] keitmo|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] fifticon|1 year ago|reply
When I need to get anything done/fixed/working on windows, I first type "control panel", to get the age-old settings UI that was unbroken in win7. From there, it is still possible (on win10 - I have avoided win11 so far) to configure most things in a sane way. Whenever I land on one of the newer tools, they present a mix of - "you can't/shouldn't view/see that" - "you should not be able to change that". - "some settings have been hidden/are managed by your organisation"
When I hit the newer screens, I cannot see my IP address, I cannot see my DNS providers, I cannot change my DNS providers, I cannot enable/disable my networks.
Also, to get back on track: Search/incremental keyboard handling/sorting on lists of stuff is horrendously "I eat crayons, and my product manager eats crayons!" bad. Some of microsoft's own system list screens no longer allows you to easily navigate or search your lists. So you are presented with rubbish like having to page through () hundreds of items, presented 3 or 5 elements at a time (really, on a monitor with a resolution exceeding HD??)
A pet rant, truncating list text fields to arbitrary "let's just show the first 16 characters, and then ...", still on the super-HD screen.. sigh.
On some of them, no variant of incremental keyboard search works, so with the destroyed scrollbars, you are left with manually moving through them.
() assuming the "scroll" interface even allows paging or using the cursor keys.. The modern scrollbar is the crucified victim of what modern crayon-eating humans have lost: - the size of the scrollbar thumb used to indicate the size of the list and the page size, so you could feel if you were scrolling a list of 20.000 or 300 items. - clicking beside the scrollbar thumb used to jump one page at a time, possibly with one single item overlap, so you could "tell" that you had jumped an exact page. - scrollbars used to have little arrows to let you jump 1 item/row at a time. - scrollbars used to be VISIBLE, so you could orientate yourself in the document ("I see, I am near the bottom of the document/list"). - nowadays, instead, you have to play a mix of "hide the mouse" and "gee, I wonder if you can spot WHICH rectangles in this window have extra available scrollbars, IF YOU HOVER IN THE RIGHT PLACE?"
[+] [-] maupin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] red_admiral|1 year ago|reply
One of the most common place name prefixes is "Llan" which means "church", as in that Llanfair... place with a long name for the tourists.
If you were to load a list of community wards in Wales and type L, that would get you to Laleston (near Bridgend), and typing L again this way would make you step through a few more before the "Llans" start.
Worse still, this way there doesn't seem to be a way to type "Llanberis" (near Snowdonia/Eryri, highly recommended for hiking trips!) because it will interpret the second L as a sign to jump from Laleston to Lampeter, and then the A will put "La" not "Lla" in the box? Or does it remember that you typed "Lla" and fill this in when you press the A key?
EDIT: read it again and this is actually in the last paragraph. It _does_ remember the second L you typed.
[+] [-] LegionMammal978|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] netsharc|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mewpmewp2|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] iggldiggl|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] izacus|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hulitu|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]