zulip/static/shared
Wesley Aptekar-Cassels 673af19a4d typeahead: Always rank exact string match first.
Previously, exact matches could be pushed off the typeahead list in the
case where there were more prefix matches that happened to rank first,
which is confusing to the user: if an emoji, for instance, falls into
this category, it will never show up in typeahead, which is easy to
confuse with the emoji not existing.

This isn't a perfect fix — there are still cases where it's hard to find
emojis because the prefix-space is very crowded, but it does fix a
category of surprising and frustrating behaviour.

This doesn't come completely without downside - it means that the exact
match emoji will jump to the front of the list, which changes what is
currently conceptually a "filtering" operation to a "filtering and
sorting" operation, but it seems on the whole to be a more ideal
experience. This is particularly notable in the non-typeahead emoji
picker, which uses the same codepath, but this change seems somewhat
desirable even there, since it allows the user to type the name of an
emoji and press enter and have that emoji show up, without having to
visually confirm that they aren't inadvertently selecting a
prefix-matching emoji.

A better solution to this in the long term might be ordering emoji
results by shortest-first as a tiebreaker for alphabetical ordering,
since that should provide the same behaviour while keeping the mental
model as "filtering" (since the sort order won't change as the user
types), but this seems like a reasonable first pass, and changing to
shortest-first ordering after making this change won't break any muscle
memory for existing users.
2021-02-25 17:55:54 -08:00
..
js typeahead: Always rank exact string match first. 2021-02-25 17:55:54 -08:00
README.md
package.json shared: Bump version to 0.0.4. 2020-12-30 15:02:13 -08:00

README.md

The files in this subtree are part of the Zulip web frontend, and are also incorporated by the Zulip mobile app.

Note that the deployment cycles are different:

  • In the webapp, this code is deployed in the same way as the rest of the web frontend: it's part of the server tree, and the browser gets it from the server, so the client is always running the same version the server just gave it.

  • In the mobile app, this code is deployed in the same way as the rest of the mobile app: it's bundled up into the app binary which is uploaded to app stores and users install on their devices. The client will be running the version built into their version of the mobile app, which may be newer, older, or simply different from the version on the server.

    The mobile app always refers to a specific version of this code; changes to this code will appear in the mobile app only after a commit in the mobile app pulls them in.