Incremental search breaks after a character repeats

[DanD]

Among my many tasks, I have one called "Meet person X", and another one called "Learn one cool magic trick". The problem is that typing "mee" or "coo" does not set focus on these tasks, because the repeating letter causes the incremental search to stop.

MLO 5.1.1. The issue was noticed as far back as 2014. It gets pretty bad if you have projects with codenames that contain repeating characters, or even "Get car papers from AAA", and you type "aaa", which is a pretty unique string - it won't find that task, and you know for sure it exists.

[Joel]

Are you referring to the *search* (ctrl+F) or to the *filter* (ctrl+L) ? 

I tried both and could not recreate the problem.   Search for "loo" and found "lookup" among others immediately on the second "o".

FYI I am on 5.1.2 beta so maybe this actually an issue and was addressed already but not sure.  I can't speak to that.

[Dan Dascalescu]

Neither, just type the characters in the outline view (in quick succession). I have a task whose name starts with "SSS" and it's impossible to find it that way. MLO keeps jumping among various tasks that start with "s".

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/mylifeorganized/eI-Hh6nvpfI/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to mylifeorganiz...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mylifeorganized/b7947dc7-126c-480c-9dde-150cc224c058n%40googlegroups.com.

[Joel Azaria]

afaik that's not how it works.  If you just start typing characters in the outline view it just jumps to the next instance of that character.  So if you hit 's' three times you'll just bounce through the next three items starting with 's'.

There is a filter function - ctrl + L - which filters the current tab/view and a Find funtion - ctrl + F - which will search globally in your .ml file.   These both work as you expect.

[Dan Dascalescu]

On Fri, May 14, 2021 at 6:14 AM Joel Azaria <fhsn...@gmail.com> wrote:

afaik that's not how it works. If you just start typing characters in the outline view it just jumps to the next instance of that character.  So if you hit 's' three times you'll just bounce through the next three items starting with 's'.

Indeed, if you hit 's' 3 times, MLO will jump among the next three items starting with 's'.

But if you hit "Cle" (quickly), MLO will jump to the next task starting with "Cle", not to a task starting with 'e' (the third character).

Why the inconsistency?

[Stéph]

I think it's because MLO uses a lot of standard Windows function libraries (for example, you'll notice that the "Recurrence" pop-up window comes straight out of MS Outlook). There are other Windows apps which do the same thing when you type a letter to jump quickly to a task. I think the contacts search in Outlook works the way you want, Dan, so it may be possible for the MLO team to switch to a different library for their instant search function. 

I've never really used the instant search function, specifically because I thought it doesn't let you type strings of letters at all. As for Joel and fhsn... I always stuck to Ctrl+F (and, sometimes, Ctrl+L).

Stéphane