1283149 - The case sensitive checkbox has gone!

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Webtools Graveyard :: DXR, defect)

Description

[Rail Aliiev [:rail]]

Looks like the case sensitive checkbox has disappeared from dxr.m.o. Not sure if this is intentional, but it'd be great to have it back! :)

Thank you!

Comment 1

[Erik Rose [:erik][:erikrose]]

It is indeed gone! It was a major source of bugs and confusion, since the goal of keeping it stable as you surfed from page to page conflicted with having a predictable start state and having a reproducible set of results when clicking a saved or shared search link.

What's replaced it is two things:
1. Case sensitivity guessing: if a query term includes capital letters, we assume you mean to search case-sensitively.
2. The @ operator: put an @ before a lowercase query term to force it case-sensitive. (This is documented far too subtly in the Operators menu, but we want to add some advisory bubbles that show up when appropriate.)

We're interested to know how this works out for you and specifically if you could use a way to search for mixed-case things case-insensitively.

Comment 2

[Rail Aliiev [:rail]]

Oh! Now I see it hidden in the id section of the Operators menu. Probably better to explicitly mention it in the list.

Thank you for the explanation, totally WFM!

Comment 3

[hwine]

(In reply to Erik Rose [:erik][:erikrose] from comment #1)
> It is indeed gone! It was a major source of bugs and confusion, since the
> goal of keeping it stable as you surfed from page to page conflicted with
> having a predictable start state and having a reproducible set of results
> when clicking a saved or shared search link.

Isn't that what query params in the URL are for?

> What's replaced it is two things:
> 1. Case sensitivity guessing: if a query term includes capital letters, we
> assume you mean to search case-sensitively.
> 2. The @ operator: put an @ before a lowercase query term to force it
> case-sensitive. (This is documented far too subtly in the Operators menu,
> but we want to add some advisory bubbles that show up when appropriate.)

Sounds like a documentation bug then. What followup action needs to happen?
 - write a "moving from mxr to dxr" guide?
 - put a link to "UX changes" in the UI somewhere?

fwiw, it sounds like you've implemented vim's ":set ignorecase smartcase" behavior. That seems to have stood the test of time.

Comment 4

[Peter Elmers [:new_one]]

I'm a bit late to the party, but I wanted to mention that as a side benefit the new behavior supports per-term case-sensitivity, where the checkbox could not. "Bar foo" will match "Bar" case-sensitively but "foo" insensitively.

Comment 5

[Erik Rose [:erik][:erikrose]]

> Isn't that what query params in the URL are for?

1 or 2 years in, and it was still causing problems. So we decided to try something else. People would paste each other query strings but forget to say "And remember to turn case-sensitivity off!", and the poor recipient would get no results. Having it as an out-of-band thing wasn't going well. Now, I'm not sure "@" is the final incarnation, but it's a start. We've also thought about a global modifier spelled something like "case: " or "nocase: ". It would go at the front of the query and be followed by a space. It would follow the same pattern as Google's "allintext:". Feelings?

> fwiw, it sounds like you've implemented vim's ":set ignorecase smartcase" behavior. That seems to have stood the test of time.

Yes, that was what gave us the idea.

Comment 6

[Erik Rose [:erik][:erikrose]]

> put a link to "UX changes" in the UI somewhere?

For awhile I've wanted to have a Release Notes thingy somewhere in the UI. High time I ticketed that. Thanks for the nudge! See bug 1283560.