1254111 - Allow arrow-up and arrow-down to repeat previous searches in devtool's search box

Status: NEW

(DevTools :: General, defect, P3)

Description

[Jens]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:44.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/44.0
Build ID: 20160210153822

Steps to reproduce:

Focus on any search box in the ffdevtools, e.g. Inspektor search, debugger search or style search. Press ↑ (arrow-up) key to use the last search input (like in a normal shell or like in the console input in ffdevtools). 


Actual results:

Nothing


Expected results:

Show the last search input so that I can reuse it

Somehow related to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1004511 The search boxes would really need some love from a UX perspective

Comment 1

[J. Ryan Stinnett [:jryans] (Use needinfo, replies may be slow)]

Seems like a good enhancement idea.

Comment 2

[Jens]

In the end something compatible to libreadline would be awesome, where I can also search the history (e.g. Ctrl-R to reverse search through history). Though this would be more needed for command line input like console or GCLI than just the search box.

Maybe the input widgets could be based on something like https://github.com/sdether/josh.js (a toolkit for building a bash-like shell in the browser, including full readline support)

Comment 3

[arni2033]

Currently, Inspector's filter field is used to show suggestions AND there's a _real_ bug:
"It's impossible to show collapsed suggestions again by pressing Up/Down without typing something"

If this enhancement is really necessary, could it at least use Ctrl+Up/Down to avoid confusion?
Since (Ctrl+)Up/Down historically do nothing in <input>s anyway (bug 1260840, bug 394628, bug 294642)

Comment 4

[Brian Grinstead [:bgrins]]

(In reply to arni2033 from comment #3)
> Currently, Inspector's filter field is used to show suggestions AND there's
> a _real_ bug:
> "It's impossible to show collapsed suggestions again by pressing Up/Down
> without typing something"

How about ctrl+space to re-open the suggestions menu?  We are using that in Scratchpad to open the autocomplete menu.

> If this enhancement is really necessary, could it at least use Ctrl+Up/Down
> to avoid confusion?
> Since (Ctrl+)Up/Down historically do nothing in <input>s anyway (bug
> 1260840, bug 394628, bug 294642)

Yeah I'm not in favor of taking over up/down keys in a search box (IMO it fits in with the console input because it's more like a command line).

Comment 5

[arni2033]

(In reply to Brian Grinstead [:bgrins] from comment #4)
> How about ctrl+space to re-open the suggestions menu?
Up/Down proved to be a convenient way to summon suggestions in most _input_ fields that provide them:
<input name="q">,  searchbar/locationbar,  Ruleview (CSS)
Of course there're exceptions:  filters in Inspector and Debugger (last one is clearly malfunctioning)

My point is, no matter what keys are used for each action, there should be no confusion.
Suggestions behavior (at least in devtools) should be consistent among <input>s, and among <textarea>s
such as Console (separately). See also bug 1143742 (it's dealing with autocomplete in multiline rules)