The built-in search is very clever and works great with long posts with lots of replies - it’s neat how all the thousands of replies don’t have to come down to the client to be searched.
Is there a way to quickly navigate search results with keyboard shortcuts or hotkeys?
For instance, this interesting thread has over a thousand replies:
I would likely to quickly jump to all the replies that include the string "len", one by one, in chronological order.
I think my ideal workflow would be something like:
Load that thread
Ctrl-f
Type: len
Repeatedly press F3
This would ‘scroll’ to bring the next post with that search term in it into view, and highlight the search term in the post.
This precise workflow already works in many applications (for example Google Chrome).
That works if there are not many posts matching your search.
But, try searching for ‘len’ in the thread I linked - some of the search results are hidden behind a “More …” ‘link’. And even after clicking that, I don’t see an easy way to go through the posts one by one.
You can kind of press '/' -> down-arrow -> down-arrow -> down-arrow -> enter, but then when you press '/' again, it takes you back to the top of the list.
Maybe there’s something that I’m missing. Do you know of a better workflow?
There are definitely some improvements we can make for outlier cases like an enormous post with multiple hits and topics with tons of hits, straight keyboard navigation through search results in the topic could be cool.
Very fiddly to get it to work perfect though.
Maybe someone starts with a shortcut for “next / prev” search result. This could be handy. We need to start with deciding on a shortcut.
