Re: [evolution-patches] Much improved search bar patch

["Thouis (Ray) Jones" <thouis gmail com>]

On 5/13/05, Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj novell com> wrote:
> Thouis is arguing something completely off-topic from my arguments.
> 
> And *then* he also argues I shouldn't reject the patch based solely on
> my arguments because they aren't that big of a user change anyway.
>
> Huh!?!?

I didn't say anything about rejecting or accepting a patch.  I talked
about evaluation of the patch.

There are two parts to the patch: incremental searching with a search
bar that appears "somewhere", and where that "somewhere" is.  Half
your message was about how the bottom was a bad place for the search
bar, and I argue that, while it's obviously not completely immaterial
to adding such functionality, it's a red herring for the most part. 
The larger part is the functionality itself.

I couldn't glean from your message whether you were trying to say
"firefox style search is good, but the bar placement is bad" or
"firefox style search is bad".  The two are significantly different
statements.  I disagree with both of them, but I disagree with the
latter more.  I think the search behaviour (modulo bar placement) is
orders of magnitude more useful than most searching methods,
particularly anything involving a dialog box.  I think placing the bar
at the bottom makes sense *in particular* because it leads to "out of
sight, out of mind".  When performing an incremental search with
highlighting, I almost never need to see the search bar.  Well, sort
of...

When I'm searching for something I know is there, then I don't need to
see the search bar unless I make a typo.  If I don't see a hit for
what I'm looking for, obviously the highlighting isn't there, and I
have to check the search bar to make sure I didn't make a typo.  But
that's perhaps 1/10 of the time, in my experience (which may or may
not generalize, obviously).

Ray Jones