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Comment by marcosdumay | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, multi selection is a disaster on any platform.

It is a hard concept that isn't completely solved by any of the standard GUI widgets.

The most robust solution is to individually toggle selected state on each item, and don't unselect all on a new click. Like a checkbox. Click once for selected, once to unselect, don't unselect all on any click.

A multi-select drop down is just solving the problem of a checkbox list being too long, or not what the designer wants it to look like. The most clear UI for this input type is a set of checkboxes in my opinion. Same for a single item select and radio buttons.

Drop downs have a lot of caveats, and unique compositions in the wild, so many of them are inaccesible and it's essentially just because someone wanted it to look pretty. I think that is bad software.

A separate multi-select control is just a bad idea from 1990s; it should be disused and forgotten. The proper way is a list of checkboxes. Checkboxes are easy to recognize, easy to style, and easy to navigate and operate.

Now make that a set of 200 checkboxes and see how practical it is compared to one combobox-style multi-select input.

200 checkboxes make about as much sense as a 200-item dropdown. Neither is manageable. The multi-select dropdown is additionally hard to check for the selections made.

An input box with pill-style auto-completion (see e.g. the tags control on Stackoverflow) would be a reasonable alternative.

Another, larger alternative is the typical two-lists control, with selected items moved from the source list to the target list; this idiom was widely used in Windows since 1990s. It's not mobile-friendly though.

> 200 checkboxes make about as much sense as a 200-item dropdown. Neither is manageable.

Multi-select is okay there, apart from the problems I mentioned above: https://jsfiddle.net/z0Ltxh47/2/ . I can navigate to i19 with a few key strokes. Only if it were then possible to easily select a1...

> An input box with pill-style auto-completion (see e.g. the tags control on Stackoverflow) would be a reasonable alternative

And we are back at implementing our custom controls again.

> And we are back at implementing our custom controls again.

Sadly, yes. Not everything was anticipated at the times of Netscape 2.

HTML5 added a number of native controls, like video players and calendars. I wish a better "native" multi-select alternative surfaced, too. OTOH I suppose that browsers are going to blur the line between "native" controls and web components and such.

I think there's an initiative to improve these... but I can't find it at the moment. Googling anything with "native" just turns up react-native crap.

> And we are back at implementing our custom controls again.

Are we? Why wouldn't we just push OS vendors to add "input box with pill-style auto-completion" as a native toolkit widget, and then have browsers expose it? The OS vendors have proven willing to add stuff like native OS date/time/number-picker widgets, so why not this one?

I like the pattern of drop downs where you can type to filter. But I've found there isn't great UI in that it's not super obvious you can type.

I was actually implementing exactly this today in Angular and went with a <mat-autocomplete>

https://v5.material.angular.io/components/autocomplete/overv...

An input box like SO's isn't discoverable though, it's not good for things that you "want but don't know exist yet"

Multiselect over a range of 200 arbitrary values isn't something that will ever be solved by a single control, so that's a complete straw man.

If you actually need to multi-select over 200 arbitrary values (you almost certainly don't), the best way to do it I've seen is a way to filter the displayed items, a "Select All" button for what's visible based on that filter, and maintaining the "checked" state through filter changes, allowing you to select anything matching multiple filters.

this problem was solved around 1986 by Norton Commander and one of the main reasons why two-panel file managers (FAR, mc, TotalCommander) are still in use.

When you decouple selection with cursor and make selection "permanent", so you can move around this list without fear to lose accumulated selection, you could pick needed elements one-by-one, sort list by any attributes to simplify selection, apply filters, etc.

Yep. When marking many files for selection the twin-pane file managers let your mind (and your stomach) rest easy. I sometimes use ranger with two or more tabs to similar effect.

There was/is a Tcl/TK twin-pane file manager I liked called FileRunner. It's showing it's age now and needs a rewrite -- not for beauty, which I'm not too concerned about, but for some glitches that have crept in with time and lack of maintenance. It seemed more mouse friendly than some other twin-pane FMs (or maybe it's just rose-tinted memory).

I'm using FAR in Windows (10 now) every day. I'm using it as my command-lime shell, really, never run cmd or powershell. For everything my console needs (and I'm using a lot of coretools/filetools in the form of mingw64).

I don't know how to live on Windows without it, it is first program I install, even earlier than alternative browser.

Usually with 200 or so values there is some categorization of values that exists - maybe it's counties in a state that can be divided into regions or songs by an artist that can be divided into album or period. Large multi-selects seem to necessitate a multi-step selection process where the user can drill down (All of this category, none of this one and some of this other one - specifically this, this, not this and that). I think it's feasible for such a tag proposal to make its way through various working groups but it'd be pretty opinionated and we'd likely end up dividing multi-select inputs into several different classes (which would probably be a good thing).

If your UI has 200 checkboxes displayed at once, in an ideal world you’re rethinking your requirements and redesigning the UI.

The only way to make a 200 item select box usable is to make it not a 200 item select box somehow.

By filtering to search, which is also a UI fraught with inaccesiblity if not very carefully designed. I think custom elements aren't the issue here really, it's the lazy implementations.

Think bigger even. In an ideal world, if you have that many options you might want to rethink the entire workflow. I understand in the real world that may not be an option, but it’s still probably the ideal state.

You just need a fuzzy text filter at the top to hide the checkboxes you don't care about.

I think this thread just about proved how insufficient the available controls are.

Hilariously, lots of good implementations on mobile. Long tap to start, checkbox next to each item that is then selected. Confirm button when done selecting.

I actually really dislike this.

I find that I often have half second hangups due to not remembering if in select mode or not.

Much prefer the "Hold shift/ctrl" model used often in file managers.

Parent is talking about mobile. And on Android it's working rather well I'd say. The only downside I see is that selecting longer spans (shift click) is not possible.

There are Android apps where you can select two items in a list and then there's a button that selects all of the items between them, which is equivalent to a shift-click.

In the context of the parents comment I thought they were comparing that model to others where multi selct exists.

I don't think there is a much better model on mobile, except possibly adding a button to each item to select a longer span.

Browser requires very fine degree of dexterity, and has 0 discoverability.

Mobile ones often have a "start multi-select" button in the UI.

Neither is an amazing experience, but IMHO the mobile one is somewhat better.

Multi-select is what you have in File Explorer. You can select multiple files and folders for copying or deletion or moving. It is not a disaster

There are problems even with the single selection (searching for an option in mobile, consistent contrast, copying selected value etc.).

Depending on the application, sometimes to fix such problems, you need to reimplement the component in js or you start won't fix'ing tickets.

So articles like this really underestimate the problems with the existing controls and the lack of some.

I would probably use a series of checkboxes for the same effect.

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