Re: [dwm] dmenu navigation with a lot of items.

On Mon, Dec 11, 2006 at 10:34:05PM +0100, Sander van Dijk wrote:

> I love dmenu, but one thing has been bothering me for a while: lists
> with a lot of items are hard to navigate. With a short list, you can
> just browse through it with left/right; with a long list you can use
> the filter to speed up navigation.

> This is only true however when you already know what you're looking
> for: typing 'fire' to quickly jump to firefox is only useful if you
> already know that that's what you want _and_ that it's in the
> list. If you are faced with a long list, in which you don't know
> exactly what's in it, typing in a filter isn't really going to help,
> and scrolling all the way through the list with --> is a big pita.

Hmm. I don't really understand how the 'pita' is changed with
paged scrolling:

Either I know where in the list of 1000 items I want to look (if I
know that, I can type at least the first character) or I don't - in
which case I have to scroll through all 1000 items. Although the
scrolling might be faster with the patch, I still think it is as much
pita as before because I have to look at the same amount of items as
before.

A real improvement for large sets of items would be a hierarchical
navigation, but then you'd have to create a structure beforehand (on
Debian this could be done via menu and it's hooks).

Regards,
Christian (totally happy with current dmenu + history patch)

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