[Design] Search

[D John Anderson]

On Feb 2, 2007, at 12:43 PM, Davor Cubranic wrote:

> On Thu, 1 Feb 2007, D John Anderson wrote:
>
>> I was thinking of a palette that acted the same as the single line  
>> text entry field, except that it contained space for more than one  
>> line. As you typed new commands the old commands would scroll up,  
>> giving you a history of previous commands you entered. Following  
>> the conventions of other shells, typing up arrow might go back in  
>> the command history so you could choose previous commands without  
>> a lot of retyping.
>
> You don't need multiple lines for command line history though. All  
> the shells that I've used that implemented this, simply changed the  
> contents of the bottom line on the screen when you backtrack  
> through the history. This is the case even in Emacs, where you do  
> have a proper screen editor, and I'm pretty sure it is to be clear  
> about what is being edited now vs. what was entered in the past. I  
> don't think it's worth the screen real estate in the end.
+1
>
> The main problem is whether the single entry/search will be  
> confusing to the user. Maybe for discoverability it should be  
> search by default (the simple case) and entry on slash prefix (the  
> more advanced case), I don't know. The current spec is reasonable  
> enough to me (entry first, especially if automatically switching to  
> search on Cmd-F shortcut), but maybe that's because I know about it  
> already and because I enter new items far more than I need to  
> search for them by their contents. It will be interesting to try it  
> out in a5 and see what the initial impressions are.
+1, except I'd probably still prefer trying out a first cut of a  
floating palette for quick entry, which I suspect is probably easier  
to implement that the "/" drop down with search control in the toolbar.
>
> Re: the shape of the text widget
> Is it the rounded edge or the little magnifying lens that indicates  
> that it's a search widget? When the field is in the command line  
> mode, the rounded space could be used to indicate this, for example  
> put a ">" or something like that.
The wxWidgets search control is only a native widget on Mac, and only  
has rounded corners there. On other platforms don't have a special  
search control, so it it looks quite different and it is implemented  
as a composite control with a search button, a text control and a  
cancel button. I'm not aware of anyone who uses it for anything  
besides search.
>
> Davor
> _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
>
> Open Source Applications Foundation "Design" mailing list
> http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/design