[Feature Request] Go to previous match when Shift clicking word

[vinismarques]

This is more of a suggestion.

It might be interesting to be able to go to the previous match of that word when clicking it while holding the Shift key, giving a similar experience to what users have in other places (default search bar included with Shift+Enter going back).

The use-case is finding matches for a specific word, but not considering the other words.

There are shortcuts to that already, but I feel that doing this through the interface would be "more natural", not requiring that users set up multiple shortcuts that will rarely be used.

[ator-dev]

Thanks for the report! This a great idea, and something I will certainly implement.

There are two notes I would like to make in addition:

• I have been considering adding a 'scroll detector' to the keyword buttons. Scrolling down with the mouse wheel (if you have one) would go down one word, and vice-versa for scrolling up.

---

• You bring up a good point about the shortcuts. I have been struggling with them: they're likely to completely overwhelm users looking for specific shortcuts, because you have to scroll past a huge list of them organised in no clear way!

  

  Additionally, we are limited to an arbitrary number of keywords that I decided to hard code. There is no way around this using the extension shortcut system.

  Possible solution:

  • Contextual jumping. One shortcut 'choses' the keyword to the left of the current chosen one, another for the right.
  • By default, no keyword is chosen, and the user can return to this state by choosing past the available keywords.
  • When a keyword is chosen, the shortcut for jumping to the next global match (Alt+Space by default) instead refers to just that keyword.

[ator-dev]

Shift+click for previous match now implemented, along with a critical highlighting fix and reduction in cases where keypresses (in inputs) are also detected by the page. Second 2 points remain to be considered.

Shipping with 1.13.7, hopefully very soon (pending review on the Chrome Web Store).

The highlighting improvement in the last update contained a small error which could result in an infinite loop, freezing the page. I am looking into ways to avoid such problems in future.

Edit: now published for Firefox and Chrome