The main point of FARR is to launch things ultra-fast, without pausing for mouse clicks or other niceties. However, one item which the user still must do first is to switch the keyboard into the correct language.
For instance, on my computer I have both Hebrew and English keyboards installed. If my active keyboard happens to be Hebrew when I launch FARR, and I try to type in "notepad", what I will get instead is a jumble of hebrew letters ("מםאקפשג").
Google has actually implemented a feature which takes care of this in its search engine: when a bunch of nonsensical foreign language characters are entered, google's search suggest feature automatically calculates what the search term would have been if the same keystrokes had been pressed with the English keyboard active, and it presents search suggest terms based upon that calculation.
I'd like to see FARR do something similar. The basic implementation would go as follows:
- If the characters entered into FARR are not english characters, FARR should calculate the English characters which correspond to those foreign-language keystrokes. The results box should of course first show items which match the foreign characters, but after that it should also display items which match the corresponding English keystorkes.
- As a second stage, you might want to make this configurable to work in the other direction as well: that is, a user might want English keystrokes to also display results for certain foreign-language equivalents. FARR would do this for any of the currently installed keyboards.
Thank you,
Avi Shmidman
