Re: Great SWT Program

On Nov 1, 5:43 am, blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
If they've improved things since then, there's still the matter that
Windows and Mac and I expect KDE and Gnome search boxes reappear
populated with the last performed query, while those / prompts give
you a tabula rasa every time...

All it takes to counter that is to be able to retrieve the previous
query in a few tools.

I said the / prompt comes up blank. Is this or is this not true? (What
you can get by subsequently hitting keys is irrelevant; if you want to
"counter that" you will need to show me an instance of it not coming
up initially blank. Indeed you'd need to show that that is no longer
common behavior at all.)

Also, having a way to get a past query to reappear quickly, but making
the very existence of such functionality unobvious, isn't very
helpful. People will see a blank prompt and type a new query unless
they have some indication that they can do more with it than that. GUI
input fields with this capability offer such a cue: there'll be a down
arrow by or in the box that drops down a list of previous queries, and
starting to type might also trigger an autocomplete that fills in the
rest -- if you searched for "echidna" and type "ech" you might find
the box showing "echidna", with the last four letters selected (so you
can keep typing e.g "echo" without ending up with "echidnao" instead).

I don't recall the / prompts doing anything of the sort; no drop-down
box (how can there be in text mode?), no self-triggering autocomplete,
and no indication at all that there's anything more to it than just a
prompt that, if you're lucky, supports backspace, left and right
arrows, delete, and cancels if you hit esc. One of those that did have
a command history I had had occasion to use for months wishing it had
such a feature before miskeying one of the left/right arrows
unexpectedly got me something other than an annoyed beep (probably was
an up-arrow that it saw).

This is a good example of the doing-it-blindfolded fetish in unix
command-line tools. Apparently you need to hit random keys to discover
everything, or else read all 300+ pages of documentation. Up and down
arrows, tab, control-this, alt-that...

I tried vim and the pager "less". Both of
them keep a history of previous searches one can cycle through,
giving access not just to the immediately-previous search but to
earlier ones as well. That can be useful. I can't be bothered
to do experiments to find out whether typical GUI search dialogs
support that. Maybe they do.

See above -- some don't provide anything fancy, usually in
applications where there's little need. More sophisticated ones
designed to support large and complex user tasks provide a drop-down
history and/or autocomplete of previous searches. Explorer's search
(the Windoze filesystem search -- well, one of them, since you can of
course run ports of things like grep or third party graphical tools
like Agent Ransack) does this for example. The Google search box
(actually, configurable to other search providers too) in Firefox
comes to mind also. Neither of those has a visible drop-down arrow,
but if you start to type something you've used previously in the
session (or in the Firefox case, in quite a large number of days at
least, and it also matches some sort of dictionary, apparently a
superset of the one used for spellchecking textareas in forms) it will
drop down the matches from its history. I just opened an Explorer
search and typed and deleted single letters until I got an example
from earlier in the session: typed an L and it dropped down a box with
"leopard". At that point I could keep typing, or use down arrow+enter
to put "leopard" in the box, and another enter to actually launch a
search. So l down enter some editing enter would let me modify the
query and resubmit it. The functionality quickly becomes apparent as
soon as you do one search and then start to do a similar one. Unix
tools with similar functionality reveal it to a user far more
grudgingly. "Choosy about its friends" indeed; it's downright
taciturn, almost to the point of being a complete recluse. :)

.

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