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Re: History of incremental searching
From: |
Barry Margolin |
Subject: |
Re: History of incremental searching |
Date: |
Mon, 17 May 2004 11:35:16 -0400 |
User-agent: |
MT-NewsWatcher/3.4 (PPC Mac OS X) |
In article <m3u0yf2j2x.fsf@defun.localdomain>,
Jesper Harder <harder@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie<none@example.invalid> writes:
>
> > Just out of curiosity, does anybody here know the how, when, where and by
> > whom of incremental searching?
> >
> > When was it invented, and in which product? Did it arise first in Emacs?
> > Whose idea was it?
>
> This page <http://www.handykeys.com/about.htm> suggests that it was
> invented at MIT:
>
> this feature usually goes by the name "Incremental Search". The
> initial idea and implementation was done circa 1974 by researchers
> at MIT and later included in the popular word processor named
> "EMACS" (Richard Stallman, 1979). The claim that incremental search
> should be a fundamental part of making software easier to use was
> argued by Jef Raskin in his excellent book "The Humane Interface".
Which of course explains why most software does *not* include this
feature. :)
The only similar thing I've seen in commercial software is in Mac OS X's
"Console" application, which is used for viewing log files. It has a
"Filter" field that's used to display lines matching a string, and it
updates its display as you type. If Emacs had this, I guess we'd call
it "Incremental-Occur".
--
Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***