Select frame: a new model for interaction

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2021-07-07 16:00:04

Typical interactions with web pages involve a single element. For example, when we view a search result, we visit or open each result one at a time.

This approach does not scale, it is tedious, and prone to misclicks. Why must our mouse chase around every element we wish to touch? Turns out, it does not have to.

Our solution started with a really simple question: Why can't we drag and select multiple objects like in our file explorers? Why do we have to manually interact with every single element?

As a result of this development, Nyxt now offers a drag select interface (select frame) to interact with multiple elements at once!

Let's consider the common example of searching via a search engine, and then opening up the search results in several tabs/buffers.

Another common example is visiting a news aggregator website. In this example we'll be visiting Hacker News. We'll be doing something quite similar as above to select multiple elements, but this time, we'll start an expedition rather than opening a new tab/buffer for each link.