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Comment by hnthrowaway0328 | Hacker News Reader

Actually that's the most sane way for countries sorted by alphabet. Since I live in Canada I always expect CCC...until I hit one.

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In a list of "Countries by alphabetical order", I see:

- Cabo Verde - Cambodia - Cameroon - Canada

So if you were typing 'can' instead, you would always be correct (today) even if one of the earlier ones were removed.

Yeah, Canada seems easy to me. United States of America, I could relate to due to so many different ways of writing it.

I'd say it's the opposite - it makes sense for unsorted lists (CCC gets you to the third C-country) because if it's sortes you can just press C-down-down which is just as fast if you have your hands on the keyboard. And if your right hand is on the mouse, you'll still have to either move the pointer to the right country and click it (at which point might as well only press C once) or move it to Enter (at which point the arrow keys are just as reachable).

That only works because for the country list you have no conflicting repeated keys like "ll" going to "lemur" instead of "llama"

And that's the overwhelming majority of cases. Wanting to select an item starting with the same letter repeated twice is rare. It makes sense to speed up common cases at the expense of rare cases.

Not really since those rare cases are more memorable, so in addition to other UI elements having different behavior (though I admit this is the much bigger factor) you don't treat this as a reliable mechanism for search. So you'll just enter the next letter as you do everywhere else, and your frequency balance changes

And it especially doesn't make sense for such an long-standing core UI toolkit to not have these kinks ironed out. These behaviours are already handicapped by their obscurity, no reason to make them behave counterintuitively on top of that

As a long-time Windows user, I simply have to disagree. I use both methods constantly, and removing one would be a significant degradation in usability. Whenever I have to use software that doesn’t have them I miss them sorely. The rare case, on the other hand, is so rare that I don’t even remember the last time I came across it. It is negligible.

The behaviors also aren’t that obscure, assuming you learn that you can select by typing a character in the first place. When used regularly, you then rather quickly learn what happens when you type multiple characters.

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