Incremental find

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Screenshot of performing "Find as you type" in Mozilla Firefox. "ency" was being typed and the first matched text was highlighted in green.

In computing, incremental find, or inline find/progressive find, is a feature that can be found in various applications that involves the searching of text string. Usually, in contrast to traditional find, no modal window is used. A keyboard shortcut, usually "/", is assigned to invoke the find function.

As the user types, the matched text is found (and usually highlighted). It can also find next/previous matched text. This is more robust than traditional find as finding is done immediately when typing starts. Also, it is better in terms of usability as no modal window is used. In the case of modal find, the user may need to move the modal window around, as it can block the part of the screen which contains the matched text.

[edit] Examples

Non-modal incremental find is not only found in most modern web browsers like Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Konqueror, but also in Apple Computer's iTunes & Spotlight (which searches the entire computer), Microsoft's Windows Vista, Windows Media Player and Windows Live Messenger, and many text applications like Emacs, Archy, Vim, NetBeans IDE, less and Eclipse. In Mozilla jargon, it is coined as Find As You Type (FAYT). Incremental find was first introduced in Winamp on February 14, 2000 with version 2.60.