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Comment by jecel | Hacker News Reader

Rasking recommended cancelling searches by mashing the keyboard randomly to extend what you had typed so far with something that was sure to not be found in your text. The search advances with each new key you type while holding "leap". I agree that this was not discoverable at all, though it is trivial to learn. I don't know if backspacing while leaping would backtrack the search, but if that was the case it would have been what I would have tried (this would be just a little slower than Jef's suggestion).

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Huh. That's a lot of weird effort and loss of cognitive focus, just to net out at nothing. As with having to hold down a key because the designer refuses to admit the mode it invokes is a mode, by modern standards this seems all not very completely thought out.

The idea of using incremental search transparently for both navigation and retrieval does appeal - I could see adding that to Emacs, as a union of isearch and occur, maybe - but we've learned a lot about interaction design in the intervening decades which leads me to feel the veneration of Raskin may often obstruct evenhanded critique of his work: as with Jobs, people seem to confuse the appellation of "visionary" with a guarantee that its recipient's vision was perfect.

Jef considered holding down a key to be a "quasi mode". It is like the difference between the shift key and the caps lock key.

Those are not equivalent; barring some highly unusual configuration, the Shift key has no effect on application state outside the scope of the keypress. In that sense it seems to me that Leap leaks.

If you can be “in a mode, but only temporarily” – like the shift key puts you in capital letter mode “only temporarily”, as opposed to how CapsLock does it “permanently” (until you press it again) – what does that prove?

AFAICS only that there is a mode.

Glue some little mechanical contraption onto the Cat's keyboard to hold down the Search key until you nudge the thingymabob again to release it, and it's just as (semi-)“permanent” as CapsLock. (AFAIK, that's exactly how CapsLock worked on mechanical typewriters.) The fact that they didn't build that into the Cat's keyboard in the first place is just an implementation detail... That seems very much like a feint to avoid admitting that there's no “quasi” about it; a mode is a mode is a mode.

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