[mythtv] "A", "An", and "The" for sorting - ticket 3048

[Peter Schachte]

Dave Sherohman wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 03:11:32PM +1100, Peter Schachte wrote:
>> Joshua M Thompson wrote:
>>> will Video Manager ever allow me to hit a
>>> letter and jump to that part of the list?
>> How about using the digit keys?  Pressing a digit
>> key n could jump you to n/9 of the way through the list.  Eg, pressing 0 takes
>> you to the beginning, 9 to the end, 3 to 1/3 of the way through the list,
> 
> How about a configuration option to tell it whether you have a proper
> keyboard or not?  No real need to cripple those with keyboards just
> because there are others who don't.

If you don't mind not being able to jump to a movie whose title begins with a
digit, you could allow both:  if you enter a digit, you jump to the appropriate
 percentage of the way through the list; if you hit a letter, you jump to the
first entry beginning with that letter.

> Alternately, there are methods out there for simulating a full keyboard
> using only a numeric pad, as can be attested by pretty much anyone with
> a cellphone.

Unfortunately, most remote controls don't have letters printed on the number
keys.  I suppose it could be made to work reasonably conveniently, but there's
still one advantage of using number keys to jump to a proportional place in a
list:  it works no matter how the list is sorted.  Eg, if you want to find a
really bad movie, you can sort the movies by IMDB rating, but you can't really
use letters to jump to the end of the list.  Using number keys you would just
hit 9.  Or if you want to watch an old recording, you could go to the All
Recordings list and hit 8 or 9.

-- 
Peter Schachte              Among the vanquished the poor people went
schachte at cs.mu.OZ.AU        hungry, among the victors the poor people went
www.cs.mu.oz.au/~schachte/  hungry.
Phone: +61 3 8344 1338          -- Bertold Brecht