Re: [Evolution-hackers] Search in message/Find in message

[Lee Revell <rlrevell joe-job com>]

On Sun, 2005-07-03 at 01:57 +0200, guenther wrote:

> At least my (personal) use case for "searching" does not involve
> "Search in Message". In fact, IIRC I used it about 2 times during all
> those years I'm very actively using and supporting Evolution. The
> average Mail isn't that large, that I cannot easily spot what I'm
> looking for inside the mail.

If you are on any development mailing lists, where lots of large patches
get mailed around, you would use it all the time.

> Ctrl-F in the Mail Component is Forwarding a message. It has been like
> that for a long time (always?), and it definitely should not change
> (read: break) for the users.

Well, if your goal is to have anything resembling a usable integrated
desktop, you cannot force the user to remember a different shortcut for
the same action depending on which window they are in.  It just makes it
look like the left hand is not talking to the right.  Why have HIGs at
all?

(I'm going to ignore the emacs argument, because the people doing the UI
work on Evo clearly aren't targeting that segment with their recent
changes.)

The reality is that every web browser (including some that don't run on
Linux) uses ctrl-F.  So the options I see are:

  1. convince every other browser to change to Ctrl-S
  2. force the user to keep track of context sensitive key bindings
  3. make Ctrl-F 'find in message' like everyone else

Why can't 'f' just forward?  It's not bound to anything.  Shift-Ctrl-F
could work too.

'Find' in the current document is a universal action, I think it's
critical for desktop usability that it work the way users expect it to
and consistently across all apps.  Forwarding a message is only
applicable in a mail client anyway, so it seems less important to be
consistent with other apps.

Lee