[squeak-dev] List filtering stability issues and how to solve them

marcel.taeumel Marcel.Taeumel at hpi.de
Wed Apr 20 06:36:51 UTC 2016


Hi, there.

After my somewhat unlucky attempt to improve the list filtering feature in
Squeak:
http://forum.world.st/The-Trunk-Morphic-mt-1119-mcz-tp4890816.html
http://forum.world.st/The-Trunk-Morphic-cmm-1120-mcz-tp4890853.html

And the great explanation of the status quo by Chris:
http://forum.world.st/Squeak-IDE-videos-td4890897.html
https://youtu.be/11CLNKl5334

I want to explain a little bit more, what the issues with the list filtering
is at the moment.

-----------

Here are the *good *things:
- You can just start typing and the filter results appear.
- Matches that have the search term at the beginning come first, other
matches follow alphabetically.
- The parts that matched in an item are highlighted.
- Hitting backspace or losing focus (controlled by preference) clears the
filter.
- Re-typing after some timeout describes a new filter.
- If there are 0 matches, the new filter is not applied at all to not have
an empty list.

Here are the *challenging *things considering stability in interactive,
graphical tools:
- If there is no selection in the list, the first filter result will be
selected automatically.
- If the current selection is not included in the filter result, the first
filter result will be selected automatically.
- If the user makes a selection in the filtered list, removing the filter
will revert the selection to the one that used to be there before starting
to filter. (Which can be several minutes, days, hours, days, ago)

Here is a *change set*, which preserves the good things and fixes the
issues:
list-filtering-stability-fix.cs
<http://forum.world.st/file/n4890920/list-filtering-stability-fix.cs>  

Here is a feature which -- in my opinion -- was not intended by the original
idea of filtering lists and which -- unfortunately -- cannot be retained:
- Repeatedly hitting <Backspace> toggles between the last selection in a
filtered list and the last selection in an unfiltered list.

However, I think that such a workflow is difficult to discover and should
have a lower priority than the challenges described above. It might be added
with a preference, though. For example, "Use two-level selection in lists
with filters".

How about it? :-)

Best,
Marcel



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