GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 503800
Checkbox for case-insensitive search, why?
Last modified: 2013-09-10 10:09:17 UTC
In the svn log I read: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ r7653 | cyrilbois | 2007-11-10 00:46:37 +0100 (za, 10 nov 2007) | 3 lines Add a checkbox to enable case-sensitive search (disabled by default). No longer rely on the presence of uppercase characters to activate case-sensitive search. Please add a rationale for this decision or roll it back. Thanks.
Cyril: ping.
Chpe, your opinion? I'm in favour of rolling this back before UI freeze.
Hi folks, and sorry for the huge lag. As demanded on IRC, why I co'd it: (quickly gathered from IRC logs, chpe guided me through several dozens of lines so that I come to a clean patch, covering the overflow menu for the search bar — there's no menu involved, despite the “menu item” below.) <chpe> KiBi: about the case-insensitive find... a gconf key is rather unusual for that; how about a checkbox ? <chpe> if there's a way to do case-sensitive searches, that's ok with me. the automatic thing is a bit annoying even … … <KiBi> chpe: http://alioth.debian.org/~kibi-guest/trash/case-sensitive-complete.diff again. Unconditional creation of the menu item, no longer stored in the priv structure. Mnemonics added. <@chpe> looks good <KiBi> committed Rationale for this change: when copy/pasting some long strings, say the title of a paper, you automatically get caps in the string, why toggles the case sensitivity on, which may make you miss some matches. Not to mention proper names, words from foreign languages, that you might not be able to copy-by-typing-them easily. There's also the case where when typing your pattern, you hold the shift key for some characters, and then don't release it early enough, adding some caps in your pattern, turning on the case sensitivity. I'm very sorry not to have discussed it in a bugreport previously, but having the agreement of the maintainer (about the previous behaviour being a bit annoying) and having a commit in good shape looked to me sufficient at that time. I'll remember first opening a bugreport or starting a discussion on the list next time. Sorry again.
Not that I want to escape my responsibilities, I'd still like to point I first proposed a non-intrusive gconf key so that users annoyed by the “old” behaviour can get the behaviour they want, without changing anything else. I then followed chpe's suggestion, moving to a checkbox.
Don't worry, the original concern is just that the discussion was not held in a bug report. It's only a matter of trying to keep all the decisions documented and founded on a consensus. patch's -R option is there for a reason, no big deal. Regarding the bug, I think the mentioned emacs' style matching (sensitive if string is not just lows or just ups) is nice and intuitive. If I'm lazy I would just hit n e e d l e in my keyboard, without worrying if caps is on or off. So I would hope "needle" "Needle" "NEEDLE" "NeEDle" etc to be found. However if I take the time to use Shift or Caps to write Needle I would expect to get ONLY "Needle" as a match. I don't like the idea of the checkbox because it adds clutter to the UI, however I see your point about a case where you are searching for "Super Complex Title of Ur3aOPd-Ler Expedient" and you realize it would save you some key presses to just hit an "insensitive search" checkbox. Following the idea of sane defaults, I think that the pre-patch behaviour should stay, I would however like to put some thought into giving some clever help on the case of the super complex title. What if after no match on case sensitive, ephy goes to case insensitive if the user tries again? That would be a bit hidden though.
Adding Yelp maintainer to cc since we'd like to have uniform findbar behaviour.
Adding evince maintainer to cc since we'd like to have uniform findbar behaviour.
As of 3.9.90 (and probably earlier, but that is what I am testing at the moment), the search behaviour is as described in comment #6 (a capital letter triggers case-sensitive search, all-lowercase is a case-insensitive search) and there is no longer a checkbox to alter the behaviour at runtime.
(In reply to comment #8) > As of 3.9.90 (and probably earlier, but that is what I am testing at the > moment), the search behaviour is as described in comment #6 (a capital letter > triggers case-sensitive search, all-lowercase is a case-insensitive search) and > there is no longer a checkbox to alter the behaviour at runtime. That's a result of porting to GtkSearchBar, bug 707086. Closing this.