ctrl+f lets you search for a specific term in a page but I just realized it won’t work in topics with lots of replies, instead it brings up a forum search.
To be more clear, I was reading a topic which brought me there New country stat and when I hit ctrl+f to see where I stand, it brings up a forum search instead. So I am typing my name and I am not getting any results on the page but instead all the topics I have posted in.
Yeah it’s a bit annoying that feature, doesn’t always seem to work how it should.
If you hit CTRL + F once it should go to the forums search, if you then hit CTRL + F a second time it should then close that and use your browser’s normal Find function. So basically just hit CTRL + F twice in a row.
I don’t know of any way to “fix” it, it’s possible there’s a setting an admin can change but certainly as normal users I see no setting to adjust how CTRL F works in the forums.
TL;DR: it’s a feature - no, honestly! Use “/” instead.
Long answer: I’m guessing ctrl-f is the in-browser search of the page. But the page contents lazy-load, so the browser can’t guarantee being able to search the whole page until you’ve scrolled all the way up and down, forcing all its content to load. This is apparently “clever”, and, when first thrust upon web users a few years back was “the future”.
However, the forum software itself has its own search feature, on the “/” key (which might pull up a search panel in your browser as well as pulling up a pop-up in the corner of the window), or on ctrl-shift-f.
In Discourse Ctrl + F and also / are identical shortcuts and both bring up the native search, rather than your browser’s standard “Find” search. But it can’t search in-page which is the problem he was describing. As I said in my first post, hitting Ctrl+F twice in a row is still the best and quickest way around it.
Also, not sure what browser you use but Ctrl + Shift + F isn’t a standard keyboard shortcut so I don’t think that will help anyone. A cursory Google search tells me it’s a shortcut used in Firefox to bring up your default search engine (which for most people will be Google), but this is just as bad as the forum’s built in search as it can’t highlight the matching terms in-page.
TL;DR: hitting Ctrl + F twice is still the best “fix” for this “feature”
Ah ok, well even then the fact Discourse is hijacking a total of 3 keyboard shortcuts for its own search is a bit annoying. I think Ctrl + F should at least be left to the browser, the other less common ones “/” and Ctrl+Alt+F could be used for the forum.
