Re: [Usability] Activating find with /

[Eric Larson <elarson novell com>]

On Tue, 2005-11-22 at 15:47 -0600, Shaun McCance wrote:
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=321145
> 
> There's this sort of old Unixy tradition of making text
> viewers bring up the find dialog or toolbar when you hit
> the / key, just as if you had hit Ctrl+F.
> 
> Epiphany 1.8.2 has the following behavior:
> * Typing anything but slash or space starts type-ahead
>   find on link text only.  Once you're in this mode,
>   slashes and spaces just append to your search string.
> * Typing a slash starts type-ahead find on all the text
>   in the page.  It doesn't bring up a find toolbar or
>   anything.  It just shows what you're searching for in
>   the status bar.
> * Typing space scrolls.
> * Typing Ctrl+F brings up the find toolbar, which does
>   not do type-ahead find.
> 
> Yelp has the following behavior right now:
> * Typing anything but a space starts type-ahead find
>   on link text only.  Once you're in this mode, spaces
>   just append to your search string.
> * Typing space scrolls.
> * Typing Ctrl+F brings up the find toolbar, which *does*
>   do type-ahead find.
> 
> I don't like that slash and Ctrl+F are different kids of
> search in Epiphany.  I do, however, find link text search
> very useful from time to time.
> 
> Having slash bring up the find toolbar in Yelp would
> conflict with type-ahead on links whenever there's some
> link text with slashes in it.  But then, maybe I'm just
> making too much out of an odd corner case.
> 
> The whole slash thing probably doesn't matter to many
> "average" users (read: not *nix geeks).  But those
> pesky vi users just love it.
> 
> Thoughts?


I am not sure how applicable this is, but I remember at one point in
firefox typing a slash "/" in a form would start a text search. This was
very frustrating when blogging or filling in any in depth form fields. I
say this because I think leaving Ctrl-F as the find shortcut is plenty
in the vast majority of situation. It also provides some level of
consistency across platforms, which I think is a "good thing". After
all, someone may "try" Ctrl-F to find something when they will probably
not use "/" to find something purposely. 

Just my two cents. 


Eric