Club Silencio

Find Dialog

clarkbw discusses ideas for a better UI design of the find dialog to use in GNOME apps. In particular in gedit, the subject has been in discussion for some time.
While I agree that the current design has problems (the most annoying to me is that often the dialog covers the results), I am not convinced that the new proposed design is the way to go.
In particular it does not cover a particular aspect of searching in an editing app: how would “serach & replace” work?
I also have some doubts about the interaction described, in particular:

• “The focus is transferred to the results window”: in an editing app I would prefer if keyboard focus was left on the text, so that I can right away type in the point I was looking for
• “finally ESC closes the results window”: while I would be totally ok with this, it seems to me that the same rules used to say that ESC should *not* close the find dialog apply. If ESC is bound with the concept of undoing the changes and thus it should not be used for the close button of the find dialog, why is ok to use it to close the output window?

Foundation

I’m now a member of the GNOME Foundation. Yay!