158752 - [Composer] Menu items and keyboard accelerators to manually start type ahead find

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(SeaMonkey :: Find In Page, defect)

Description

[Aaron Leventhal]

In most windows, type ahead find can be initiated by just typing.
We need menu items and accelerators to start type ahead find manually.
For example,
Find as you type          Accel /
Find links as you type    Accel '

Here are the reasons we need this:
* Menu items for type ahead find (bug 30088) will help make the feature
discoverable.
* In addition, the menu items and associated keyboard accelerators will make it
so that the user can pick links only vs. all text during the find.
* A way to manually start type ahead find makes it possible to include the
feature in the mail message windows. Otherwise, just typing would conflict with
the single letter accelerators there, such as "n" for next unread message.
* Automatic start for type ahead find in composer would conflict with typing to
edit.

Comment 1

[Aaron Leventhal]

I have this working in my local tree, as menu items for Composer (under Edit).

A problem -- I can't get Accel+/ or Accel+' to work. presumably because they're
punctuation. Accel+[ ] - + and \ work however, when you use something like key="[".

Comment 2

[Aaron Leventhal]

Attachment: Adds menu items and accelerators to start type ahead find in composer. Needs work, because accelerators aren't the right ones yet.

Comment 3

[Aaron Leventhal]

So the questions are:
- Should we even bother with type ahead find for mailnews or composer. I have no
How is full incremental text search discoverable without a menu item?

I don't know whether we should do something about these problems or not - my
feeling is possibly no, it's too much clutter to add to the menus.

Some people have said we could get rid of the normal find dialog - but that's
the only way we support case sensitive searching, at least for now. It's also
the only way you can paste a find string in from somewhere else.

I guess I'd like to defer to someone else to provide a design spec on these issues.

Comment 4

[Jo Hermans]

*** Bug 172283 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5

[Padmanabhan V. K.]

Having autostart for typeaheadfind is too annoying. If increase in no. of 
menus is a problem, have typeaheadfind as one types into the find dialog, 
probably a checkbox in the dialog for incremental/ordinary search

Comment 6

[Owen Marshall (Not reading bugmail)]

This bug depends on bug #176296, right?. Once it is fixed, this bug may be able
to use the same fix, correct?

Comment 7

[Aaron Leventhal]

Well, they're related at least.

Comment 8

[Aaron Leventhal]

Morphing this into a bug for Find As You Type in Composer, since it now works in
browser & mailnews and has keyboard accelerators in browser & mailnews.

Not sure if we should actually fix this bug and add Find As You Type to composer.

Comment 9

[Aaron Leventhal]

Quoting glazou from IRC "this is the geekiest geeky feature in an editor"

No one seems to care about this -- no comments in a year and a half.