GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 90006
Jump to positions in list without C-f?
Last modified: 2011-02-04 16:17:18 UTC
Shouldn't it be possible to select items from a GTK listbox by using the keyboard. For example. Say I want to select 'Nimbus' font from a font selection dialog. It should be possible to press 'N' on the keyboard. if there are multiple items that begin with 'N' it should be possible to move between them by repeatedly pressing 'N'. This is a very usefull feature especially where accessibility is concerned. And is badly needed in Font selection dialogs, File selection dialogs etc. It appears as if adding such a facility directly to the GTK listbox widget (I think it is called GTKCList) should fix this.
GtkTreeView (the non-deprecated list widget) supports C-f (or C-s if you have emacs keybindings on) to start an explicit incremental search. An explicit incremental search internationalizes much better than "hit a key to jump to items with that letter" ... characters in an internationalized name may not correspond to a single keystroke. I'll leave it up to the GtkTreeView maintainers as to whether they want to close this NOTABUG, or leave it open to track the issue of people not finding this feature. (There probably is another bug this is a dup of, though I don't see it quickly.)
Might be nice for gtk+ 2.4. CC'ing anders, who made a patch at some point.
Not going to make 2.4.
can c-f do repeat searching? Besides, c-f is limited to match exact from the beginning of string. At least repeat c-f should has last input as default and continue searching from the current cursor.
You hit up and down to continue searching.
IMO type ahead is a really useful feature. Its the one feature I really enjoy when using windows. With one hand on the key board and one hand on the mouse I can navigate pretty quickly all within the gui using a min amount of effort from either hand. It's a very nice marrage between a GUI and a command line.
We now have a pretty nice plan on how to do this, but it's too drastic to go inot the stable branch. It should be possible to get this into 2.6.x though.
This is now in cvs HEAD, and in 2.5.1