About
HandyFind was designed and created by Edwin Evans (Home Page/Resume).
Please email comments about HandyFind or this web site to me. If you find it useful, consider making a donation
History
Being able to find words as you type has been a popular feature in editors used by software programmers for a long time. The feature usually goes by the name "Incremental Search". The initial idea and implementation was done circa 1974 by researchers at MIT and later included in the popular word processor named "EMACS" (Richard Stallman, 1979). Recently, this feature has become more widespread and is sometimes referred to as Find As You Type, Search As You Type, Type Ahead, Inline Search, Interactive Search, Look-Ahead Search or Word-Wheeling. The claim that incremental search and LEAPing should be a fundamental part of making software easier to use was argued by Jef Raskin in his excellent book The Humane Interface, along with many other great ideas!
The idea of showing the search status at the same location as the found text (thus helping the user to locate the found text as well as putting the search status at the user's locus of attention) was the invention of Edwin Evans. HandyFind's implementation of incremental search and "search for selected" on top of Microsoft Windows and programs written for Windows was the creation of Edwin Evans.Thanks
Thanks to the following people who contributed to HandyFind:
Marc Richarme, Mark Bozeman, PJ Naugter, Igor Tandetnik,
Jef Raskin,
Chris Maunder,
Jordan Russell (for the excellent Inno Setup installer),
Jeff Partch, Patrick Philippot, Jakob
Bieling, Alfred Kroll, Mike Frith, James White, Robert Reimann,
Gavin Lambert, Herman Berliss, Tim Wilde,
Alan Cooper
Big thanks to Kyle Alons at Kinook Software for identifying and providing guidance on how to fix a problem that was causing hangs, and several other excellent suggestions. Big thanks to Alex Kolesnichenko also for adding support for non-Western keyboard input and bug reporting. Check out his great software at ByteGems.com.
Special thanks to Elaine Chien for suggesting a much better way to deal with IE frames and recursively nested frames and for being my wife and love of my life -- not in order of importance.