Feature request: Move search dialog out of the way

Feature requests, and in-depth discussions of features and the way Mellel works

Moderators: Eyal Redler, redlers, Ori Redler

Would you like a moving search&replace dialog?

No, I can always move it by hand if I need to.
3
8%
Yes, eventually.
21
54%
Yes, as soon as possible.
11
28%
I have a better idea (go and post!).
4
10%
 
Total votes: 39

Mart°n
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Post by Mart°n »

nicka wrote:For Mellel's quick find function, I'd prefer an Apple Preview-like find to a Firefox-like find.
The main difference is that in Preview you get a scrollable list of hits in their order in the document, whereas in Firefox you have to keep pressing Apple-G to jump from one hit to the next.
I’m not against a Preview like search, but I think it consumes too much space for a quick find option and space was one of the main topic of this request.
Furthermore I think that one tends to use both applications (Mellel & Preview) quite differently. With Mellel you usually write your own stuff and know or at least have an idea what’s inside your document, maybe you even know where (in which chapter) you like to find something. With Preview however, you open and search all kind of documents, created form people all over the world and with content you’ve never heard of.
If you open the Mellel Guide for example with Preview, you could easily search for a feature you like to know more about. Let‘s assume you need advanced knowledge about tabs, so you’ll enter “Tab” into the Preview search. In this case, it’s quite important to see the results list, because the find option finds “TAB”, “TABular”, “TABle”, “prinTABle”, “daTABase” and maybe other things that aren’t related to your initial search. So a results list is quite handy in this case and helps you quickly to sort out the wrong results.
In Mellel, I use the find option often to jump to a specific section, to check all instances of a word (if a name is written correctly in all cases) or do other searches, where a results list isn’t as helpful as in Preview. If the search option has a “Highlight All” option like Firefox, you could visually sort out wrong results very fast too.
So a results list would be (IMHO) a nice addition to the advanced search. On the other hand, Apple’s Pages offers exactly that. You have one sidebar (similar to the Outline area) in which you could open a Preview-like search option or you could display miniature pictures of your pages. I would be happy too, if you could switch the view of Mellel’s outline area to a Preview like search but I don‘t know, if others like to see both, the quick search and the outline.
Reiner
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Post by Reiner »

Mart°n wrote:
zoul wrote:Are we talking about the same search bar? I am talking about this thing, see the search at the bottom of the window. I think this could look good in Mellel.
That’s what I wrote about.
my mistake. sorry.
Reiner
aechallu
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Post by aechallu »

Mart°n wrote:I’m not against a Preview like search, but I think it consumes too much space for a quick find option and space was one of the main topic of this request.
Furthermore I think that one tends to use both applications (Mellel & Preview) quite differently. With Mellel you usually write your own stuff and know or at least have an idea what’s inside your document, maybe you even know where (in which chapter) you like to find something. With Preview however, you open and search all kind of documents, created form people all over the world and with content you’ve never heard of.
I disagree on two grounds 1) With little overhead (a button to toggle the function on/off) the outline pane can be switched into a search pane à-la-Preview.
2) Navigation features are important in any context. That's what some people use the outline pane for. I find myself using search functionality all the time in long documents.

In any case, I think that Mellel needs some way of quickly finding strings without the complication of the feature-rich (and excellent) standard search window. It may be based on firefox (including the color tagging) or on preview, but something needs to be done.
Marco
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what about "set to automatically fade" pref?

Post by Marco »

I started using Mellel when AccordanceBible pointed to Mellel as the best word processor for handling bilingual texts with Hebrew in them.

AccordanceBible is an app for thoroughly searching Bible-related texts.

It has a very nice feature, called "instant details box". Imagine you have a main window that diplays the Hebrew text that you were searching for. While the mouse hovers over a Hebrew word, a smaller box outside the main window instantly displays the inflected word, the dictionary entry it comes from, the parsing and the meaning.

Recently it became even better: the instant details box can fade automatically in a few seconds when the mouse is NOT hovering over a word. In this way, the instant details box gets out of the way you looked at it.

This can be set as a preference: if I prefer, I can have it as it used to be.

How could this concept be implemented to improve the "find and replace" box in Mellel?

I suggest that the "find and replace" box could be set to automatically fade when you move the mouse out of it.

I think of this as an option available to the user in the preferences: you could have the traditional find & replace, or the automatically fading find & replace.

Ideally, it would be best to be able to set the fading time to 1 second, or 2, or 3, according to the user working habits.

Marco
Mart°n
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Post by Mart°n »

aechallu wrote: I disagree on two grounds
1) With little overhead (a button to toggle the function on/off) the outline pane can be switched into a search pane à-la-Preview.
That’s only true if you have the outline pane already opened. One important point (at least as I‘ve read the comments above) of this thread is space – screen space to be more exact. If some users couldn’t see the text and the found results because of the big search window, it could be because they don’t have some free space on their screen to put the search window on. This may be due they’ve opened the outline pane. But maybe they don’t use the pane and still need a smaller search window. In this case, a small Firefox-styled find bar would be better than to open the then find pane which occupies also a lot of space. (One may think of the old 12" PowerBooks, the new 13" MacBooks or even older iMacs with 1024 x 768 or 800x600 pixels).
aechallu wrote: 2) Navigation features are important in any context. That's what some people use the outline pane for. I find myself using search functionality all the time in long documents.
That’s true but if you would like to see some words around the found one to get an idea of the context, the search pane need not only some but some more pixels in width to display all the information. And that may lead to a search feature which doesn’t solve the initial problem of this thread. In my case, a preview-like search would be a good solution as my screen isn’t the smallest but I couldn’t assume the same for all the other users.
Mart°n
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Re: what about "set to automatically fade" pref?

Post by Mart°n »

Marco wrote: I suggest that the "find and replace" box could be set to automatically fade when you move the mouse out of it.

I think of this as an option available to the user in the preferences: you could have the traditional find & replace, or the automatically fading find & replace.

Ideally, it would be best to be able to set the fading time to 1 second, or 2, or 3, according to the user working habits.
I’m not sure if that will work for the search window. Sure, it solves the problem, that the user doesn’t have to move the search box to see the results, but often when I search for something, I have do more than one search in a row (means that I have to press “next” or “previous” several times to find the desired location.
If I’m on a Mac with a small screen and search for the first word “pear”, Mellel finds the word but it’s right behind the search window, I have to move the window or wait until it fades out. If I now see the result and notice that I’d like to find the word “pear” in another chapter, I have to open the search window again, wait until is gone, see the result and open it another time.
I guess that this would horribly slow down the process of searcing. It may work in AccordanceBible and it works in a small translator utility called Ultralingua when I search for a single information once in a time but I think it doesn’t work if a window is used multiple times a time.
donb
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Post by donb »

Of course, you can always use Command-G to find the next occurence of your search word, or Command-D to find the previous occurence, without having to reopen the search window at all....

Don Broadribb
Marco
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Re: what about "set to automatically fade" pref?

Post by Marco »

Mart°n wrote:
Marco wrote: I suggest that the "find and replace" box could be set to automatically fade when you move the mouse out of it.

I think of this as an option available to the user in the preferences: you could have the traditional find & replace, or the automatically fading find & replace.

Ideally, it would be best to be able to set the fading time to 1 second, or 2, or 3, according to the user working habits.
I’m not sure if that will work for the search window. Sure, it solves the problem, that the user doesn’t have to move the search box to see the results, but often when I search for something, I have do more than one search in a row (means that I have to press “next” or “previous” several times to find the desired location.
If I’m on a Mac with a small screen and search for the first word “pear”, Mellel finds the word but it’s right behind the search window, I have to move the window or wait until it fades out. If I now see the result and notice that I’d like to find the word “pear” in another chapter, I have to open the search window again, wait until is gone, see the result and open it another time.
I guess that this would horribly slow down the process of searcing.
I understand your concern. It was my own, but I think that Don answered that: if you needed to search for the next word, you could type Command-G, if you wanted to search for the previous, you could type Command-D, if you just wanted to call the Find and replace window to the foreground, you could type Command-F again.

In short, you could always the keyboard shortcuts and instantly get the standard behaviour. The "fade" feature would not interfere with that, In my view, the "fade" feature would only affect what you see if you do nothing for 2 or 3 seconds. That is, slightly less than the time it would take to move the mouse out the find window, and click on the document window.

Marco
Mart°n
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Re: what about "set to automatically fade" pref?

Post by Mart°n »

Marco wrote: if you needed to search for the next word, you could type Command-G, […] if you just wanted to call the Find and replace window to the foreground, you could type Command-F again.
That’s right, of course but there may be a reason, why I have opened the find window (maybe because I like to search for a series of similar words, or i like to enable – and later disable – the highlighter, switch the “ignore case option”) where shortcut won’t help at all.
Marco wrote:
In short, you could always the keyboard shortcuts and instantly get the standard behaviour. The "fade" feature would not interfere with that, In my view, the "fade" feature would only affect what you see if you do nothing for 2 or 3 seconds. That is, slightly less than the time it would take to move the mouse out the find window, and click on the document window.
I disagree. Don’t know how slow your mouse is (and I use a pen which is even faster to use than every mouse) but I only need a second to move the window. So the “get out of my way” phenomen still exists. In the first example, I have to move the window, in the second I have to wait for it to fade out.
In my view, the fade out thing shouldn’t be used for windows at all. A help bubble or a explanation like in Accordance or Ultralingua may fade out as the information displayed on those bubbles are only used once at a time. You don’t have to adjust anything in those windows.
If you take the current find window, there are a lot of options to set up and one may think about them. To let the fade be a solution to the problem posted by the initial poster, the fade out time has to be 1 or 1.5 seconds. On the other hand, look at someone who opens the window and tries to set up something:

1. You open the window (cmd+f or via the button) [keyboard or mouse]
2. You enter the find string [keyboard]
3. You like to check one of the options [mouse]
4. You hit next or preview [keyboard or mouse]

During this not so unusual procedure, you have to switch from keyboard to mouse at least once and those time could be already longer than the fade out time. So the user get’s a the wors experience he could think of. He opens the window, enters a first string, switchtes to the other input device and the window is gone away. OMG!

That’s one of many examples where fading out a normal window wouldn’t be a good idea at all. Therefore I don’t think it could compete with a quick find (either Firefox or Preview or a totally new Mellel stlye).
Marco
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Ok, you're right

Post by Marco »

Ok, Mart°n, you've persuaded me. You are right: when you need to stop and think while looking at the window, it would be a nuisance if it disappeared in 1,5 seconds.

Any more ideas?

I would second a Firefox-like box; but I would like to be able to recall the old find/replace window when needed.

Marco
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