Searching focuses in the title instead of matching text

Thomas Lohrum
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Searching focuses in the title instead of matching text

Postby Thomas Lohrum » Thu Nov 27, 2014 7:58 am

When i search for text and open a matching note, the focus is always set to the title. However, the matching text is not in the title, but the note's text only. When i move the caret to the notes text using arrow-down, the first match gets highlighted. This used to work in earlier versions of CN.

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Re: Searching focuses in the title instead of matching text

Postby CintaNotes Developer » Fri Nov 28, 2014 11:26 am

What is Options / Editor / Initial Focus set to?
Alex
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Re: Searching focuses in the title instead of matching text

Postby Thomas Lohrum » Fri Nov 28, 2014 4:45 pm

CintaNotes Developer wrote:What is Options / Editor / Initial Focus set to?

It is set to "title".

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Re: Searching focuses in the title instead of matching text

Postby CintaNotes Developer » Mon Dec 01, 2014 6:40 am

So you think that CN should disregard this setting when the search box is not empty?
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Re: Searching focuses in the title instead of matching text

Postby Thomas Lohrum » Mon Dec 01, 2014 12:58 pm

CintaNotes Developer wrote:So you think that CN should disregard this setting when the search box is not empty?

This is not about using Ctrl+F inside the editor. The problem is, when you search using the main window and open a matching note, the editor used to set the caret to the first occurrence of the search string. This functionality is broken. The caret is always set to the title. Nevertheless, we are talking about two related, but different issues anyway. The second issue is on the roadmap for three years and has 28 votes at this time; check here http://roadmap.cintanotes.com/topic/103694-highlight-searched-words-in-notes-title-in-editor/

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Re: Searching focuses in the title instead of matching text

Postby CintaNotes Developer » Tue Dec 02, 2014 12:38 pm

Ok now I get it, thanks Thomas.
The first issue will be fixed in 2.9, the second I hope with 3.0 or later.
The best approach to deal with these errors would be to get away with separate edit control for title,
and just load the title into the main richedit control as first line (perhaps with increased font size, this will also look much better).
And the F3 thing will "just work" after that without any special programming.
Alex
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Re: Searching focuses in the title instead of matching text

Postby Thomas Lohrum » Tue Dec 02, 2014 12:45 pm

CintaNotes Developer wrote:Ok now I get it, thanks Thomas.
The first issue will be fixed in 2.9, the second I hope with 3.0 or later.
The best approach to deal with these errors would be to get away with separate edit control for title,
and just load the title into the main richedit control as first line (perhaps with increased font size, this will also look much better).
And the F3 thing will "just work" after that without any special programming.

Hi Alex,

this sounds very interesting, as it would also solve an issue, when i occasionally try to select title and text by pressing Shift+Alt+Down, which won't work of course. :) Maybe we can give this a try as part of a 3.0 beta and decide on its value thereafter?!

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Re: Searching focuses in the title instead of matching text

Postby CintaNotes Developer » Tue Dec 02, 2014 12:47 pm

I think this is definitely worth trying. The problem is that not all users want to have titles in all notes,
and when first line automatically becomes the title there will be a lot of "random" titles..
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Re: Searching focuses in the title instead of matching text

Postby Thomas Lohrum » Tue Dec 02, 2014 12:54 pm

CintaNotes Developer wrote:I think this is definitely worth trying. The problem is that not all users want to have titles in all notes,
and when first line automatically becomes the title there will be a lot of "random" titles..

Maybe those users can tell why and how they use notes without a title. Do they actually have mixed notes (some notes with, others without a title) or do they actually don't use titles at all. If we better understand the issue an option might help. For example (a) disable title handling globally or (b) have a note's property to enable/disable the first line as a title.

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Re: Searching focuses in the title instead of matching text

Postby usbpoweredfridge » Tue Dec 02, 2014 12:57 pm

CintaNotes Developer wrote:The problem is that not all users want to have titles in all notes,


Definitely - though I use titles in all my notes currently, I do appreciate having the flexibility to not have a title, if I so desire.

CintaNotes Developer wrote:and when first line automatically becomes the title there will be a lot of "random" titles..


Yes, even more of a problem than the first, IMHO.

I'm sure there is a solution, it will just take some careful thought.

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Re: Searching focuses in the title instead of matching text

Postby CintaNotes Developer » Tue Dec 02, 2014 12:57 pm

Maybe those users can tell why and how they use notes without a title. Do they actually have mixed notes (some notes with, others without a title) or do they actually don't use titles at all. If we better understand the issue an option might help. For example (a) disable title handling globally or (b) have a note's property to enable/disable the first line as a title.

This is a good idea actually. But I'd appreciate if other users would chime in here and describe how they use titles.
I think it's important to stress out that titles will remain to exist in the DB, and it will still be possible to limit the search to them, and to sort by them. Merging title and main text will happen only during editing.
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Re: Searching focuses in the title instead of matching text

Postby Thomas Lohrum » Tue Dec 02, 2014 12:59 pm

CintaNotes Developer wrote:I think it's important to stress out that titles will remain to exist in the DB, and it will still be possible to limit the search to them, and to sort by them. Merging title and main text will happen only during editing.

Indeed, very promising!
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Re: Searching focuses in the title instead of matching text

Postby CintaNotes Developer » Tue Dec 02, 2014 1:00 pm

usbpoweredfridge wrote:I'm sure there is a solution, it will just take some careful thought.


I think I know one: the old notes without titles will appear in the editor as if the first line was empty.
This way they'll remain titleless.
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Re: Searching focuses in the title instead of matching text

Postby Thomas Lohrum » Tue Dec 02, 2014 1:16 pm

CintaNotes Developer wrote:
usbpoweredfridge wrote:I'm sure there is a solution, it will just take some careful thought.
I think I know one: the old notes without titles will appear in the editor as if the first line was empty.
This way they'll remain titleless.

That is a pragmatic solution. :) Rather than using technical implementations the user can use a functional way of handling its workflow. In that, it is not much different to the current design. However, the user must be aware he/she can simply press ENTER to create an empty title.

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Re: Searching focuses in the title instead of matching text

Postby usbpoweredfridge » Tue Dec 02, 2014 1:24 pm

CintaNotes Developer wrote:This is a good idea actually. But I'd appreciate if other users would chime in here and describe how they use titles.


For my note taking, I use titles in all my notes. The two reasons are organising, and finding. With regards to organising, I like to keep things neat and tidy, and I shudder to think of the mess if I had a whole notebook full of notes without titles! Also, if I keep things organised, when I find a note (no matter what method I use to do that), I can hopefully tell if that is the note I actually want just by reading the title (this is a time saving thing - if I have many notes on a particular subject, without a descriptive title I would have to open each one to work out which one it is I was looking for).

By finding, I mean that by giving them a descriptive title, I can use the title field to find notes if the other methods fail (tags and the search field - the tag list is my primary method of locating notes). Ideally, I aim to have at least one keyword in the title (and that same keyword may in fact be a tag for the note as well). In fact, recently I have begun to change the naming convention of my notes with regards to keywords in the title. For example, I have a Software notebook. Inside that notebook, I have notes regarding the use of CN :) I tag each of these with 'cintanotes' of course, but I begin the title with 'CintaNotes:" - the notebook contains notes on many other software titles, and by doing it this way, I ensure that all the CN notes stay together.

CintaNotes Developer wrote:I think I know one: the old notes without titles will appear in the editor as if the first line was empty.
This way they'll remain titleless.


Yes, that would probably work. The only concern I would have would be that someone may update to that version of CN, and then would notice that some/all of their notes now have a blank line at the top. Being neat and tidy, they may feel compelled to go in and delete that blank line, and then would find that suddenly, all their notes have titles now. Of course, this would be easy to fix (open each note, and hit Enter on the first line to shift everything downwards), but maybe a mention in the documentation?

Chris
Last edited by usbpoweredfridge on Wed Dec 03, 2014 8:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
Thomas Lohrum
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Re: Searching focuses in the title instead of matching text

Postby Thomas Lohrum » Tue Dec 02, 2014 1:41 pm

usbpoweredfridge wrote:For my note taking, I use titles in all my notes. (...)

Chris,

thanks for sharing your thoughts in detail. I too use a descriptive title for all my notes, which i use for search by looking at it in the notes list. Also considering that the notes list preview might display one line only, the title is important (also check here: http://roadmap.cintanotes.com/topic/3381-different-view-modes-minimal-compact-normal/).

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Re: Searching focuses in the title instead of matching text

Postby usbpoweredfridge » Wed Dec 03, 2014 8:49 am

Made a correction to an error in my above post - I said originally that "By finding, I mean that by giving them a descriptive title, I can use the search field to find notes if the other methods fail". I actually meant "By finding, I mean that by giving them a descriptive title, I can use the title field to find notes if the other methods fail"

Thomas Lohrum wrote:Also considering that the notes list preview might display one line only, the title is important (also check here: http://roadmap.cintanotes.com/topic/338 ... ct-normal/).


Indeed, in that case, titles would be important (not that it needed it, but I have just added my vote to that one as well)

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Re: Searching focuses in the title instead of matching text

Postby CintaNotes Developer » Wed Dec 03, 2014 12:21 pm

Thanks for your input, guys!
I take it that generally you consider the idea to remove separate edit control for title a good idea - that's the main
point. I think we'll give it a try, of course keeping in mind all nuances. By the way Simplenote uses the same approach and
it seems there are no difficulties for the users there. Also it will make Simplenote sync better - the editors will match each other.
Thanks again.
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Re: Searching focuses in the title instead of matching text

Postby usbpoweredfridge » Tue Dec 23, 2014 11:21 am

CintaNotes Developer wrote:I take it that generally you consider the idea to remove separate edit control for title a good idea - that's the main
point.


Whether it is a good idea or not is something we will only find out when the change is made and we give it some time and see how many user complaints flood in! However, I think it is worth a shot. Myself, I think that it will probably take me a little time to get used to it, as I am well used to how CN looks and works now - I would be interested in trying it though just to see how it goes. Maybe a beta release for this specifically, and then if it works out, it can be put into a final - and if it doesn't work out, then the final reverts to how it is now?

I know there is a big downside (for you that is) to doing it this way - from the developer's point of view, putting in all that work to make the change only to maybe have to scrap it before the final version i. Could be a bitter pill to have to swallow and ii. May be completely unjustified depending on the resources available to the developer. Much better from the developer's point of view would be to put the work in to make the change without having any worries about whether it will have to be reverted or not - which means a 'this is the new interface, for better or worse, it's not changing back' in this case. So I would perfectly understand if you took the latter course, and not the former.

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Re: Searching focuses in the title instead of matching text

Postby CintaNotes Developer » Thu Dec 25, 2014 11:48 am

usbpoweredfridge wrote:Whether it is a good idea or not is something we will only find out when the change is made and we give it some time and see how many user complaints flood in! However, I think it is worth a shot. Myself, I think that it will probably take me a little time to get used to it, as I am well used to how CN looks and works now - I would be interested in trying it though just to see how it goes. Maybe a beta release for this specifically, and then if it works out, it can be put into a final - and if it doesn't work out, then the final reverts to how it is now?

I know there is a big downside (for you that is) to doing it this way - from the developer's point of view, putting in all that work to make the change only to maybe have to scrap it before the final version i. Could be a bitter pill to have to swallow and ii. May be completely unjustified depending on the resources available to the developer. Much better from the developer's point of view would be to put the work in to make the change without having any worries about whether it will have to be reverted or not - which means a 'this is the new interface, for better or worse, it's not changing back' in this case. So I would perfectly understand if you took the latter course, and not the former.


Thanks for your comments, Chris. Well my goal is to have a great product in the first place. There's no point to keep something just because it's been a lot of work. It is already a sunk cost. If it hurts the product rather than improves it - why keep it?

Also I'm a huge fan of throwing reduntant code away. The only code that doesn't have bugs is the code that doesn't exist :)

However it could be that I'm satisfied with the change, but the majority of users is not. In this case, it will require some persuading for me to revert the feature.
Alex

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