Re: [Usability] Re: Standardizing Find and Replace windows

[Breda McColgan <breda mccolgan sun com>]

As you're brought up the subject of vi..... :)

vim has the "highlight every occurrence" feature that you mentioned,
which I find very annoying. I often enter a dummy search just to clear
these highlights.

On the other hand, I do like the way that vi/vim indicates that the
search has wrapped to the beginning of the file: the message "Search
wrapped around BOTTOM of buffer" is displayed in the bottom left corner
of the window (inverse video in vi, red text in vim). Unobtrusive enough
to be ignored if you don't care about the wraparound, yet obvious if you
are watching for the warning.



Regards,
Breda.



Alan Horkan wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, Michael Toomim wrote:
> 
> > Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2003 22:57:56 -0700
> > From: Michael Toomim <toomim ocf berkeley edu>
> > To: Usability gnome org
> > Subject: [Usability] Re: Standardizing Find and Replace windows
> >
> > Dan Zlotnikov wrote:
> >
> > > Next, something that's always bothered me about those search windows. Is
> > > there a situation in which the user would prefer to have no results
> > > returned, rather than have the search auto-wrap?
> >
> > Yes.  Say, for instance, that a user wants to find out if there are any
> > sentences about fancy cars in a set of documents.  So she clicks find,
> > types in "car", and clicks "find next" until she sees a match for "car"
> > in a sentence that talks about them being fancy.  In this situation,
> > she'd like to stop when she's visited all references for the word "car",
> > so that she knows that none of the matches were what she was looking for.
> 
> I dont think this alone is enough reason not to have automatic wrapping
> to the start of the document.
> What this does means that before auto wrap happens there needs to be some
> sort of a clear break and indication that the search has been wrapped.
> A popup message is too intrusive for users who like the auto wrap, and a
> status bar message might not be enough for those who dont, a short No-Op
> or some sort of Pause before wrapping might provide a clear enough
> indication of what is happening.  Presumably there must be program out
> there already that has gotten this right.
> 
> Any minute now some one is going to mention vi and emacs and talk about an
> advanced search that highlights every occurance of the search terms in the
> document, and it is all going to get far too complicated.  Ooops too late,
> I just did.  This is deja vu all over again.
> 
> Keep it simple, know your target audience (I cant believe I even need to
> say this).  The kind of search features required by Gedit are (or at least
> should be) very different from the needs of an application like Anjuta
> DevStudio.
> 
> Sincerely
> 
> Alan Horkan
> http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
> 
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