Searching in Camino (and Mozilla?) by just typing

Perhaps this is in the “things everyone else has known about for years” class, but I just discovered, by accident, that when viewing a web page in Camino if I just start typing, the page will automatically just to the first occurence of what I type. For example, if “FOAF” is halfway down a page, by the time I’ve typed FOA, “FOAF” is highlighted and the page has scrolled down to that section of the text.

This may also work in other browsers, I’m not sure.

Comments

Lou Quillio's picture
Lou Quillio on July 28, 2003 - 22:24 Permalink

In recent releases of Mozilla/Firebird (Win), one keys an apostrophe followed by text to “Type Ahead Find” links only, slash followed by text for full-text searching. Control-G thereafter for Find Next.

Oddly, if you skip the apostrophe or slash it’s assumed you only want to search the links on the page. This can be defeated (and full-text made the default) by going to about:config and searching for this key:

accessibility.typeaheadfind.linksonly

Change its value to “false” so that full-text is assumed, and use the apostrophe when you’re only searching a page’s links. Frankly, I don’t see the point of links-only searching being the default, since link-text is included within free-text. Probably an evolutionary artifact or a special-needs consideration.