Feature: progressive search, mouseless copy-paste
By geor...@google.com on July 30, 2010 19:27 (imported from Google Code)
A frequent operation is to select some text on the screen with the mouse and paste it (for example, for long path names). Users do this to avoid making typos, but switching to the mouse is very slow.
The mousesless copy-paste feature would be an adjunct to the find feature. When the findbar is open, searches would happen progressively (as with emacs C-s). The selected region can be extended to the right or left with keystrokes (TBD), and another keystroke does an instant copy-paste of the text, leaving it in the clipboard.
Implementation:
Progressive search would work by using events to search a small number of lines, frequently returning to the event loop. This is easier to implement than using another thread because of the amount of locking that would be necessary to avoid race conditions.