[Usability]Re: A (Re)"search" idea

[Michael Toomim <toomim uclink4 berkeley edu>]

Joaquin Cuenca Abela wrote:
> Hi,
>
> My usability profesor at the university showed us
> several (imo) very good ideas.

What you're describing is very similar to I-Search in XEmacs/Emacs.  You 
might want to take a look at it.

Particularly, XEmacs gives you three of the features that you were 
talking about:
  A) Uses a little line at the bottom of the screen for you to type the 
search words in so that you don't get the annoying dialog box
  B) Highlights all matches at once
  C) Lets you search forwards and backwards without clicking on any buttons

I think this is also implemented in the most recent version of GNU Emacs 
(v21.2).

http://www.xemacs.org
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html

There are problems with the (X)Emacs appraoch as well.  For instance, 
newbies often don't see the little line at the bottom where they type 
their search terms, it isn't as obvious and in-yer-face as a dialog box, 
and the dialog box approach doesn't require you to totally mangle your 
existing UI layout in order to fit a search box somewhere (which causes 
confusion, disturbs the peace, and isn't as easy to code).

Also, I don't like the way you highlight all matches in addition to the 
current match by changing the color.  It's too hard to tell that only 
ONE of them is the "current" match -- and what it means to be the 
"current" match.  Maybe you should only highlight the current match, and 
underline (or use some other style of tricky typography) to highlight 
the alternative matches?

I have my XEmacs set up so that the primary match gets a new background 
color, and all secondary matches get a new foreground color + underline. 
 A screenshot of my setup is at

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~toomim/xemacsmatch.png

It's also a scary thing to remove the menubar and toolbar.  How do you 
exit from the search?

I generally like having bars with the scrollbar, but it looks a little 
messy in the screenshot you gave.  You might want to consider adding a 
right-hand side margin to put those lines in (like Eclipse does) so that 
they don't get in the way of the scrollbar.