HandyFind: LEAP for Windows

Rave

For all of you who are waiting for Microsoft to get its act together and add incremental find to Internet Explorer, I have news about something even better — and it isn’t an IE plugin. It’s Edwin Evans’ HandyFind, which gives you incremental search in most Windows applications, including Internet Explorer, Notepad, Wordpad, Word, Excel, and all applications that use Microsoft’s main text editing controls. Even better: It gives you one interface that works with all of these programs! Humanized is proud to endorse Edwin’s work and HandyFind.

HandyFind is a bit like Enso in that it works everywhere; it concentrates on figuring out how you should do something, and provides a way for you to do that one thing no matter where you are. With Enso, you issue commands: open notepad, minimize the window, google this term, spellcheck my text. With HandyFind, you search: Where’s that sentence I wrote a minute ago? What part of the web page mentions transistors? Where is that spreadsheet cell with the cost analysis formula?

Like Enso, HandyFind runs all the time, and is totally invisible until you need it. Tap “control-space,” and a little bubble pops up. As you type into the bubble, HandyFind locates the nearest occurrence of that text in your document, web page, form, or address bar. Best of all, it moves the cursor to that location, and selects the text you searched for.

Also like Enso, HandyFind was inspired by the interface ideals of the late Jef Raskin. The Humane Interface provided a vision for a better way to use computers. (Enso, which brings Jef’s command quasimode to Windows, is an offshoot of that vision.) HandyFind brings several key elements of The Humane Interface’s LEAP idea to Windows — for example, it provides a single universal interface for searching through your text as fast as you can type.

Perhaps HandyFind doesn’t work everywhere, but every time I use Internet Explorer or Notepad (and we all must, at one time or another), I’m extremely grateful to Edwin for writing this powerful utility.

Well, compared to Ctrl-F [text] Enter Esc, HandyFind provides find-as-you-type and a compact bubble rather than a fat-assed dialog box. That’s a more than a trivial improvement, but not enough for me personally to want to install it. Then there are some apps like Firefox that implement find without a dialog box and with find-as-you-type (so it’s Ctrl-F [text] Esc). There, the improvement drops to nil. It’s noble to seek a single universal interface for a common feature across apps, but when you already have a de facto standard like Ctrl-F (which is a better mnemonic than Ctrl-Space, BTW), I wonder if Find is the place to put the effort.

I think that HandyFind *is* a place to put development effort. Incremental Search is better than modal popups.

Unfortunately that isn’t the standard in MSFT apps. I understand that they do need to stick to UI standards so that they don’t annoy the majority of their user base. Since they are willing to replace menus with the ribbon the PMs and devs are obviously willing to implement better/different UI schemes.

I hope that the next item on their UI improvement list is incremental search.

I also wish that HandyFind could be mapped to ctrl+f.

Michael Zuschlag wrote “Then there are some apps like Firefox that implement find without a dialog box and with find-as-you-type (so it’s Ctrl-F [text] Esc). There, the improvement drops to nil.”

This isn’t true. I’ve received requests to support HandyFind in Firefox/Opera (which it currently doesn’t support). This is because HandyFind:

• Shows you what you’re typing and status at your focus of attention instead of needing to move your eyes back and forth between the page and status bar
• The balloon draws your attention to the found text which is helpful for small fonts where the highlight is difficult to locate
• You can press Enter to activate a link instead of needing to press Esc, Enter
• You can select a word and press a single keystroke (Ctrl+Alt+Arrow) to find the next occurence of it instead of Ctrl+C, Ctrl+F, Ctrl+V, Enter

These things add up. If you give it a try, I hope you find that it’s a useful way to navigate content and not just a replacement for the cumbersome Find dialog.

Note: You can map the key to bring up search to Ctrl+F in the options dialog if you like. The reason I picked Ctrl+Space is that it will still allow you to easily get to the Find dialog if you need features from that, and it is easier to hit Space than F… but maybe Ctrl+F would be better.

Maybe the keybindings could be consitent with Visual Studio, which I find handy :

F3 : go to next occurrence.
Shift + F3 : go to previous occurrence.

Ctrl + F3 : go to next occurrence of selected text.
Ctrl + Shift + F3 : go to previous.

The F3 binding is consistent in many text editors…

Would it be possible to allow the user to choose the key mappings? Personally, I hate F3, even though it is fairly standard, because, being off the QUERTY keyboard, I find I have to take my eyes off the screen and look for it, since its location varies somewhat between keyboards. That is a big minus for usability , in my opinion.

Another thought: It seems to me that it would be most humane to make the default key shortcut Shift + F, for the following reasons:

1. You are trying to replace the Find function, and this will do so without the user having to learn a new behavior.

2. If the user is forced to use a new shortcut (like Ctrl+Space), they will inevitably try to use it in other programs where HandyFind doesn’t work, thus causing frustration.

3. The user can still get to the old Find function via the menus, if they really want to, so you haven’t ruled out that option.

Whoops. I meant Ctrl+F, of course. Not enough coffee yet.