"type ahead find death grip" [LWN.net]

"type ahead find death grip"

Posted Feb 11, 2004 19:24 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1)
In reply to: "type ahead find death grip" by rfunk
Parent article: A grumpy user's browser review

That's when the browser gets into the "typeahead find" mode, and there's no way to get it to direct your keystrokes into the form you're trying to fill out. Usually I end up reloading the page to get out of this mode. Recent Galeon releases have gotten better in this regard, thankfully, but it still happens.

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"type ahead find death grip"

Posted Feb 11, 2004 20:22 UTC (Wed) by TheOneKEA (subscriber, #615) [Link]

I disabled that in Firefox. Just go to Tools->Options->Advanced and deselect "Finf As You Type".

"type ahead find death grip"

Posted Feb 11, 2004 21:05 UTC (Wed) by stuart (subscriber, #623) [Link]

I'm so glad someone else suffers from this! I don't know how to properly initiate it, so it is not useful when it could be and when I use google it bites me. Gah.

Who finds this damn thing useful?

Stu.

"type ahead find death grip"

Posted Feb 11, 2004 22:35 UTC (Wed) by bryn (guest, #1482) [Link]

I can see a use for this, but it would be so much more useful if only happened on request. It's screaming out for tab-completion of some form.

"type ahead find death grip"

Posted Feb 12, 2004 0:07 UTC (Thu) by movement (subscriber, #871) [Link]

Press '/'. After some time getting used to it I find it indispensable. It's really a power user feature though; it should be off by default as it's not obvious that Escape will cancel it.

"type ahead find death grip"

Posted Feb 13, 2004 1:17 UTC (Fri) by Mithrandir (subscriber, #3031) [Link]

I find it very useful as I'm a vim user, and am thus used to typing a slash, followed by the search term, to find things. When it was first introduced into mozilla (in 1.1 or 0.9 something?) it was a bit buggy, but it has been completely stable now for ages.

I'm suprised the other browsers have probs with it. Does anyone know what the (approximate) numbers of users each of the open source browsers has? I'm guessing that things stabilise quicker in Mozilla because it has heaps of Windows users pounding on it.

"type ahead find death grip"

Posted Feb 12, 2004 0:06 UTC (Thu) by movement (subscriber, #871) [Link]

Pressing "Escape" doesn't work for you ?

"type ahead find death grip"

Posted Feb 12, 2004 0:09 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

No, pressing ESC doesn't help when it gets stuck in the typeahead find mode. Again, very recent Galeon releases have been a bit better in that regard. Epiphany 1.07 had the full-scale disease, though.

"type ahead find death grip"

Posted Feb 12, 2004 3:58 UTC (Thu) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link]

I am not that surprised that there are problems like that. The Gecko/Mozilla code does some really evil things with keyboard focus, to the extent where you are better off not mixing a native GTK widget that can take keyboard focus and a mozilla content area in the same toplevel window.

This is one of the reasons I usually use mozilla or firefox.

(Note that I haven't actually looked at these bits of the moz code for a few years, but unless they have been changed completely the problems would still be there)