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Type Ahead Find - How to find "11"?

Posted: 24 Jul 2013 11:32
by Marco
As the title says. I typed "11" hoping to see all the elevens in the list highlighted. But, with some surprise, the message in the status bar kept me telling I was searching for "1" only, no matter how many times I press 1 or how fast. Seems like this behaviour is quite rooted, and I don't understand if I'm doing something wrong.
I know Live Filter will be the next big thing after Breadcrumbs and it will kind of blow away TAF (at least imo), but I'm curious nonetheless.

Re: Type Ahead Find - How to find "11"?

Posted: 24 Jul 2013 14:44
by armsys
Marco wrote:As the title says. I typed "11" hoping to see all the elevens in the list highlighted. But, with some surprise, the message in the status bar kept me telling I was searching for "1" only, no matter how many times I press 1 or how fast. Seems like this behaviour is quite rooted, and I don't understand if I'm doing something wrong.
I know Live Filter will be the next big thing after Breadcrumbs and it will kind of blow away TAF (at least imo), but I'm curious nonetheless.
When I just type "13" for 2013, XYplorer highlights all files with "13".
Just normal typing speed.
Just press "," or ".", it will just backward or forward as described in the manual.
It works fine here.

Re: Type Ahead Find - How to find "11"?

Posted: 24 Jul 2013 14:48
by armsys
Here is how I experiment your "11" pattern:
1. Search all filenames with "11".
2. In the detail pain, just type "11".
3. XYplorer instantly highlights all filenames containing "11".
4. Pressing "," or "." will just backfoward or forward. Very handy.

Re: Type Ahead Find - How to find "11"?

Posted: 24 Jul 2013 14:53
by admin
Marco wrote:As the title says. I typed "11" hoping to see all the elevens in the list highlighted. But, with some surprise, the message in the status bar kept me telling I was searching for "1" only, no matter how many times I press 1 or how fast. Seems like this behaviour is quite rooted, and I don't understand if I'm doing something wrong.
I know Live Filter will be the next big thing after Breadcrumbs and it will kind of blow away TAF (at least imo), but I'm curious nonetheless.
Yes. This is because XY follows the standards that are expected from TAF: Repeating one letter should move you through the matching items. Only when a different letter is added ("112") the repeated letters count as parts of one string.

The consequence is that you cannot find "11". Not in XY and not in WE.

I'm well aware of the issue, and it has even hit me in real work situations a couple of times. Yet, I did not have a good idea how to solve it. Maybe some "end-of-pattern" key? Clumsy, and which key should that be?

Re: Type Ahead Find - How to find "11"?

Posted: 24 Jul 2013 15:01
by TheQwerty
Don, just a thought but could TAF have mild support of wildcards?
Then this could be solved by typing '11*'.

It would also provide a means of easily switching between 'from start' and 'match anywhere' modes, accomplishing grindax's wish here: http://www.xyplorer.com/xyfc/viewtopic.php?p=89796

EDIT: I realize now it's probably not an ideal solution to grindax's wish, but maybe it's a good enough compromise?

Re: Type Ahead Find - How to find "11"?

Posted: 24 Jul 2013 15:02
by Marco
Ah, gotcha now. I thought that a delay of at least 750 msecs (as you write on the 12.70 promo page) was considered as "end-of-pattern".
I don't know if it should be "solved". As I said, I have big expectations for LF and, as far as I'm concerned, TAF is just a temporary replacement.
My 0.02€.

PS:
Repeating one letter should move you through the matching items.
This is the culprit. The newest commands you added serve exactly for this purposes. If I, user, type something, I expect it to be matched as a string. (And in fact I regard the choice of using . and , as custom shortcuts for such new commands unwise, as those are valid characters in filenames. < and > are definitely better)

Re: Type Ahead Find - How to find "11"?

Posted: 24 Jul 2013 15:35
by admin
TheQwerty wrote:Don, just a thought but could TAF have mild support of wildcards?
Then this could be solved by typing '11*'.

It would also provide a means of easily switching between 'from start' and 'match anywhere' modes, accomplishing grindax's wish here: http://www.xyplorer.com/xyfc/viewtopic.php?p=89796

EDIT: I realize now it's probably not an ideal solution to grindax's wish, but maybe it's a good enough compromise?
Hm, wildcards is something different. And, at least for German keyboards, * is not easy to type.

Re: Type Ahead Find - How to find "11"?

Posted: 24 Jul 2013 18:15
by Jerry
admin wrote:Yes. This is because XY follows the standards that are expected from TAF: Repeating one letter should move you through the matching items. Only when a different letter is added ("112") the repeated letters count as parts of one string.
Why does XYplorer still need to follow this convention, especially now that we can bind keys to next/prev match? Is there something you can't get around in the underlying Windows API or you don't want to break this convention? Escape key will always reset the match.

Re: Type Ahead Find - How to find "11"?

Posted: 24 Jul 2013 18:24
by admin
TAF is expected to work this way. And I assume that this TAF behavior is pretty hard-wired muscle-knoweldge for many power users.

Re: Type Ahead Find - How to find "11"?

Posted: 24 Jul 2013 18:26
by Jerry
admin wrote:TAF is expected to work this way. And I assume that this TAF behavior is pretty hard-wired muscle-knoweldge for many power users.
Maybe a poll should be taken about it?

Re: Type Ahead Find - How to find "11"?

Posted: 24 Jul 2013 18:32
by Marco
admin wrote:TAF is expected to work this way. And I assume that this TAF behavior is pretty hard-wired muscle-knoweldge for many power users.
Scenario before you implemented the commands to move back and forth between matches - I want to find "dog"
1. I type fast enough "dog" and I jump to the first occurence.
2. If such occurence is not what I want I wait a little and retype entirely "dog" to jump to the second occurence.

Why should it be different with queries consisting of single letters/digits? It simply doesn't make sense, to me.

Re: Type Ahead Find - How to find "11"?

Posted: 24 Jul 2013 18:33
by j_c_hallgren
Jerry wrote:
admin wrote:TAF is expected to work this way. And I assume that this TAF behavior is pretty hard-wired muscle-knoweldge for many power users.
Maybe a poll should be taken about it?
Problem with a poll is that a small minority of users participate here and Don has to think about all users...

Re: Type Ahead Find - How to find "11"?

Posted: 24 Jul 2013 18:35
by Jerry
WAIT A SECOND: How come this is only a problem when the first character is repeated but not others? For example, I can enter and match 2111 just fine, but not 1112.

Re: Type Ahead Find - How to find "11"?

Posted: 24 Jul 2013 18:36
by Marco
Jerry wrote:WAIT A SECOND: How come this is only a problem when the first character is repeated but not others? For example, If can enter and match 2111 just fine.
Yeah, that's what Don said and what I'm trying to bring the attention on? Read my post above.

Re: Type Ahead Find - How to find "11"?

Posted: 24 Jul 2013 18:47
by admin
Relax, I know it's kind of crooked, but a) I did not invent it that way, and b) it also has an advantage: (as I explained above) you can quickly move through a list be repeating a letter. You really want to give that up? I don't!

Anyway, I can offer 2 things:

1) Since standard TAF only matches with beginning of string (pattern*), I could change the code so that with "match anywhere" you could get the desired non-standard behavior. However, I dislike the fact that it complicates things just to allow searching for "11" :)

2) I kind of follow TheQwerty's idea and make * the end-of-pattern character. So you would type 11* to find "11".