104503 - Alphabetical keyboard navigation of list boxes (trees/outliners)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 133366

(Core :: XUL, defect)

Description

[Nick Kocharhook]

Look under the "Text Fields and Lists". The third bullet contains this sentence:

<blockquote>"Users can use the arrow keys to navigate through the list and can
quickly select an item by typing the first few characters."</blockquote>

Currently, the list field in Mozilla does not behave in this way. You can only
select items using the first character repeated, or with the arrow keys.

I'm guessing this doesn't work properly in OS 9 either -- there is an older
version of the Macintosh HIGs that applies to that OS. The relevant page is
here:

http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/mac/HIGuidelines/HIGuidelines-140.html

Search for "type selection".

Comment 1

[Greg K.]

Confirming as an RFE, and marking as a blocker of bug 73812.

Reporter, I'm also revising your summary. If you disagree with it, feel free to revise further.

Comment 2

[Nick Kocharhook]

No, I like yours much better. :-)

Comment 3

[Zach Lipton [:zach]]

keeping at UID for specing, etc before moving on.

Comment 4

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

In any tree or outliner control, when a non-navigation key is pressed, then:
(1) select the item for which the value in the currently-sorted-by column* is
    the closest alphabetically (case-insensitive) *after* the character typed,
    clearing any other selection if the selection changes;
(2) repeat (1) for later keys typed, matching against the accumulated string
    (not the individual character) each time, but clearing the string if no
    character was typed in the last 1.0 seconds.

* This is a bug in XUL, which someone should nag Hyatt about. Listboxes should 
have an attribute recording which is the primary column, so you can still type 
part of a bookmark name (for example) even when the bookmarks list is sorted by 
URI. Until then, the currently-sorted-by column will have to do.

Note that this means if focus is in a listbox and you want to activate an 
access-keyed control, you'll need to use the access key modifier (e.g. Alt) 
rather than typing the access key directly. In this way listboxes function the 
same as text fields.

This bug (not an RFE) certainly applies to pre-X Mac OSes, and Windows has an 
annoyingly broken version of it (only paying attention to one character) as 
well. -->All/All, -->XP Toolkit/Widgets: Trees.

Comment 5

[Jesse Ruderman]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 133366 ***