The feature is long awaited and welcome. But it should have been
mentioned in the App Kit release notes (it isn't), especially
because it changes the behavior of existing software. Believe it or
not, I actually have a case where the new behavior is undesirable.
(It's very easy to turn off, once you know that you need to do so.)
Type selection is a huge new feature, and it was tested in many
applications. Exactly what problem are you having with it in your
application? I'm curious why people have to turn it off. I know some
cases where it is required. For instance, Aperture turns it off,
since they interpret standard keystrokes as keyboard shortcuts. In
some ways, that is a disadvantage (I would love to type select in
aperture's project list).
It's because we're redirecting most keystrokes in the window to a
search field. It's a dictionary lookup tool; when browsing a
dictionary, the obvious thing to want to do by typing is to look up a
new word.
– In one case, the table view that started grabbing some letters is
short (only 10 entries) and acts as a source list. It clearly has much
less need for keystrokes than the search field.
– The other case will need a redesign, since there we are capturing
the keystrokes to do our own version of type selection, basically for
historical reasons. But until the redesign happens, NSTableView's type
selection has to be turned off because the two schemes are competing
and conflicting.
