Sebastian SchönerJun 12, 2025
IDA is one of those love/hate things for me. Do I like what IDA is doing? Yes. But one look at the very simple "go to name" window pretty much sums up all of the things I dislike about IDA. OK, here is a list of usually hundreds, thousands, or more entries. What is the chance that I want to scroll through that list?
Show threadSebastian SchönerJun 12, 2025
Luckily, there is a search button. It brings up a modal window to search. Uh. Very 90s, but OK. When it doesn't find a thing, it will alert you in IDA's console that no text was found. If there is a match for your search, it will select the first match (and you need to bring up the search popup again to go to the next match).
Show threadSebastian SchönerJun 12, 2025
Now instead of pressing that search button, you can also press Ctrl+F, which will bring up a small search bar at the bottom of the list... if you know that that's a thing, of course. This isn't actually a search but a filter, so it will remove all non-matching things from the list.
Show threadSebastian SchönerJun 12, 2025
Finally, you can also ignore all of that and just start typing a name. In that case, it will replace the tooltip below the list with whatever search term you entered and show you the result.
Show threadSebastian SchönerJun 12, 2025
So, in summary: this window has 3 ways to search it. Two of them are invisible, and the one advertised with a big button is unusably bad. This is likely a historical artifact, but if you told me this was a joke about some maximalist approach to UX design, I'd believe you.
Show threadRitesh Oedayrajsingh VarmaJun 12, 2025

@sschoener Great example of what happens when user feedback is taken at face value.

I can almost guarantee each of those different search functions is the result of a user saying “searching is bad, here’s *my* preferred solution” and a dev going “sounds good, lets implement it so this user is happy”, without having somebody take a step back and recognize that people are having trouble with the search and to figure out the common factor/how to improve it.

End result: mess of a UI.

Show threadRitesh Oedayrajsingh VarmaJun 12, 2025

@sschoener fun fact: we take all user feedback very seriously (even if we can’t immediately address it), but we ~never implement user-suggested solutions as-is. You would not believe the mess of checkboxes and pet features Superluminal’s UI would be by now if we did implement all user UI suggestions.

Sometimes this annoys people in a “why can’t you just …” kinda way, and the answer is that this is how we prevent becoming part of a thread like this in ~10 years :P

Show threadDaniel Collin
@rovarma @sschoener 100% agree. It is *much* more important to think: "What is the user trying to active" instead of blindly add the requested feature(s).
Jun 13, 2025 at 6:19amWeb
Show threadMichael CouplandJun 13, 2025

@daniel_collin @rovarma @sschoener Yes! Users are (approximately) always right when they describe a problem, but often don’t have full context to identify a “good” solution.

It’s common for feedback to start off in “solution space” but pushing the conversation into “problem space” is usually a good idea.