Questions about the highlighting system

[molleweide]

Hi,

If I search for a char that there are many instances of some hints light up in white and some red and usually the red chars are all the same. What is the purpose of these. I have read the usage guide a couple of time but this is stilla mystery to me.
If I press the red char the cursor moves but I don't understand the pattern of where it is moved.

Also sometimes if i search for f then the white hints show in one place fa and then in another place f alone and so I don't understand how to navigate to the lone f.

[molleweide]

hold on I need to read the usage guide a couple more times.

[molleweide]

i guess one big thing it boils down to is that I don't understand how to access the red chars without red background. but I am not sure lol.

[ggandor]

It just occurred to me, after writing all this stuff below, that there is a cool video available now, explaining the usage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESyld9NCl1w

Let's say your target is ab.

• After pressing s or S, the unique characters are highlighted (white). If there is only one a in the whole window, then it will be highlighted, and you will jump just by pressing a.

• After entering the first char of the search pattern (i.e., you have typed sa or Sa so far), you see all bigrams starting with a (ax, ay, az, ...) highlighted in some manner.

  • Some matches are just highlighted with white foreground, just like the unique chars in the previous step - if you enter x, y, etc. now, i.e., the second char, you will jump.
  • If the label has a red background, you can just press the label, and you will jump too (you do not have to though). Those are the so called "shortcuts".
  • Otherwise, if you see a red-underlined label, without a background, you need to continue with the pattern, that is, entering b.

• After entering b, only the ab matches remain highlighted, and you have already jumped to the first of the ab matches automatically. You can continue editing or enter one of the labels now.

[molleweide]

Hey man!! Thanks for your write up to me. I think that I might be starting to understand now. This is quite amazing when the muscle memory and reflexes really are starting to kick in. Holy shit!!!

One thing that I have noticed is this and I would like your comment on it. This pertains to red underlined chars.

1. Target is ab in word abcdef
2. Sometimes when I want to jump to target it puts a red underlined char, eg. u on b.
3. In order to jump to ab I then need to remember what char was under u.
4. Is this suppose to happen? Do you understand what I mean?

[ggandor]

That implies that cd is also a match, so that's why the label should be displayed over b. However, in that case, you will see b displayed over a (with pale brownish color in the default scheme). The only exception is when ab itself is overlapped by the label of another match before - it's a very rare case, but then b will not be visible at all, yeah.