[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: History of incremental searching
From: |
Alan Mackenzie |
Subject: |
Re: History of incremental searching |
Date: |
Tue, 18 May 2004 06:48:39 +0000 |
User-agent: |
tin/1.4.5-20010409 ("One More Nightmare") (UNIX) (Linux/2.0.35 (i686)) |
Barry Margolin <barmar@alum.mit.edu> wrote on Mon, 17 May 2004 11:35:16 -0400:
> 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".
Thanks! 1974, eh? Wow!
> 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.
There is a help facility in much commercial software, where certain
terms/sentences are listed top to bottom in a buffer. As you type
characters in, it incrementally searches for terms anchored at BOL.
Trouble is, it doesn't allow you to search freely through the list. It's
horrible!
> 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
--
Alan Mackenzie (Munich, Germany)
Email: aacm@muuc.dee; to decode, wherever there is a repeated letter
(like "aa"), remove half of them (leaving, say, "a").