Claudio Santambrogio - csant/log - Posts tagged by "".

Posts tagged with "query"

keyboard friendly google searches

top 5 things i would like to see in opera

quick find

Thursday, 6. December 2007, 19:02:35

Google is running, among its experiments, a keyboard friendly Google search.

Key     Action
J       Selects the next result.
K       Selects the previous result.
O       Opens the selected result.
<Enter> Opens the selected result.
/       Puts the cursor in the search box.
<Esc>   Removes the cursor from the search box.

A really sweet feature - just too bad you cannot configure your own key bindings…

Edit: Ohh, jorunnix, thanks for pointing it out: just add &esrch=BetaShortcuts at the end of the GET URL for your Google search

11 comments

Friday, 20. July 2007, 21:46:10

desktop, opera, usability, ui ...

Right - so they waited until I was back from vacation to start a new meme and tag me. But first of all and of little interest to anybody reading this - yes, I had great fun on vacation up north.

And now about the top 5 things I would like to see in Opera. There are many wishes I have, and every single thing I would like to see in my browser of choice I do always discuss internally at Opera - so this list will not be too new to people knowing me and working with me.

One more note: these are the top five things I would like to see - I am aware that these are not things everybody would like to see. And since I am working on UNIX, my wishes are extremely UNIX centric. You have been warned.

The wishes:

a query interface
better integration with the available UI "toolkits"
true multi-window support
tagging
dynamic session management

And now with some more details:

1. a query interface
Today there is a gap between GUI and CLI that I simply do not understand: the two interaction methods do not exclude each other, and recently there are several attempts at rediscovering the powers of CLI in graphical UIs. Query interfaces are in use in several desktop environments and in specialized applications. Time to see them available in Opera too.

2. better integration with the available UI "toolkits"
I often think that besides the Qt UI we have today, I would like to see a GTK UI, "pure" X and… why not? ncurses and CLI… depending on the context you are using your browser in. (For those that have some doubt understanding a CLI for a browser, give a look at edbrowse).

3. true multi-window support
Today you can open windows of a session only on one display - but I might be wanting to check my mail at home without quitting the running session when I ssh into my machine, or I would like to quickly write a mail while working on another DISPLAY, just by opening a new compose window on :1 in the session running on :0, write, send - done, without needing to switch to the other DISPLAY, or worse even, without having to quit Opera on :0.

4. tagging
…of mails, of bookmarks, of pages, of tabs, of windows - I want to tag (and have Opera automatically tagging) everything, and I want to be able to access the information I'd thus be able to link together.

5. dynamic session management
Session management in Opera is extremely primitive. Kestrel sees some neat improvements, but a true dynamic management of open tabs and windows is still on my wishlist. I want to be able to access tabs, windows and groups thereof (tags) as simply as I am viewing access points in Opera Mail - and I want management of this as transparent and "automatic" as accesspoints work today.

I'll also keep the game going and tag in turn
jax
ResearchWizard
Rijk
Moose
howcome

12 comments

November 2009January 2010

Saturday, 27. January 2007, 15:12:18

opera, query, usability

Quick find in Opera is a very neat way of finding what you are looking for without need of removing your hands from the keyboard.

Besides using it in history and in mail view, where by now it has established itself as a quick and easy way to find your items - unfortunately not really too powerful, though - there are two more places where I am using quick find on a regular basis - where it is more useful than in its default contexts, in my view.

Please note that in order to have this working you'll need an Opera 9.12 snapshot build which fixed a bug that badly hindered this usage.

Windows Panel
Yes, that neglected panel can be very useful when you are using lots of tabs - and with my 350+ tabs I need some way of finding what I am looking for, really. The quick find field added to the windows panel really works nice here. This is actually all of my tab management, since I have turned the tab bar off.

Mail Panel
The default search box in the mail panel doesn't help at all, since I yet have to find one user that really understands what that search field really is looking for. Did it ever find what you were expecting to find when you searched for something in there?

Well, I myself have replaced it with a quick find field - which does exactly what you expect it to do: it finds among the access-points in your mail panel what you are looking for…

I love query interfaces.

13 comments

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