Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Firefox Find Next/Prev shortcut keys

Firefox provides pretty nice hotkey support for the "Find Next" / "Find Previous" functionality of its incremental find/search feature. For the "Find Next" feature, several hotkeys are supported:
  • Alt + n - Displayed on the Firefox Find Bar
  • F3 - Standard in many Windows applications (Visual Studio, Word, notepad.exe, but not IE)
  • Ctrl + g (Find again) - Displayed in the Firefox Edit menu; used by a few other apps

For "Find Previous", Alt + p, Shift + F3, and Ctrl + Shift + g are supported, which nicely mirror the "Find Next" shortcuts.

I like this broad hotkey support for these functions; I think the (arguable) inelegance of the redundant hotkeys is outweighted by the usability benefit of having whichever common Find Next hotkey combination that is intuitive to a particular user be supported.

The incremental find feature itself and its benefits have already been covered pretty well by Jeff Atwood -- head over there to read up if you aren't familiar with the feature.

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