FWIW, "search" doesn't work on mobile (Chrome on Android): I go to "Find in Page" and none of the magic happens. It's also bypassed on desktop when I manually open the search box via Edit->Find->Find... instead of using Ctrl+F.
I wonder if there's (yet) a browser API you could hook into: the same way browsers allow JavaScript to manipulate the history [1], maybe there's a way to manipulate the Ctrl+F/find-in-page search results.
That is, right now you're capturing the Ctrl+F keypress and opening your own custom thing to read the user's search string and act on it. But what we'd really like is a way to be notified "The user just asked to search for 'xyz'. Would you like to capture that event, or let it go through to the browser's default behavior?"
A quick Google search found nothing like that exists yet. I then asked ChatGPT about it, hoping that ChatGPT would at least hallucinate a plausible design for the API — and had mixed feelings when it didn't. It just printed that 'Browsers do not provide a way to listen for the "Find in Page" search event due to privacy and security concerns' and suggested capturing the Ctrl+F keypresses exactly as you have done.
As someone else said, it would also be more like full-text search if you also considered the primary-key column, e.g. searching for "0390814603917539994005679487460590835" should jump to the 390814603917539994005679487460590835th row. (Highlighting-to-select pieces of the text also doesn't work: I'm not sure why not, since I would have thought the browser gives you at least that part for free.)
Besides "search" not working on mobile, the styling on mobile is such that the "scrolling" does not convince: to my eyes it looks too obviously like "changing the values in the cells of a fixed table" as opposed to "scrolling through the table itself." You could maybe mitigate that by animating quickly among three different page layouts with the table vertically offset by different amounts.
It occurs to me that if JavaScript has something like Python's `random.sample`-without-replacement, then you could set your `RANDOM_SEARCH_ITERATIONS` to 256 and achieve perfectly consistent (and exhaustive) "search" when the user has entered all but 1 or 2 hex digits of their desired result. And/or, you could just have the page secretly keep a history of the search results the user has already seen: this would prevent the user from finding out so quickly that "search + next + next + prev + prev" doesn't always get them back to where they started.
Speaking of exhaustive search results: With a bit more (probably equally algorithmically interesting) work, you could emulate the browser search's "7/256" by tallying up the number of UUIDs satisfying the constraint, e.g. if the user has typed "1234567" then you could display "1234567 (158456324585806817418058661888 results)" and maybe even fake up a convincing position indicator like "1234567 (17415833585801881134805987465/158456324585806817418058661888)". I guess if you display it as "1234567 (1.742e28/1.585e29)" then you don't even have to cheat that much. :)
I wonder if there's (yet) a browser API you could hook into: the same way browsers allow JavaScript to manipulate the history [1], maybe there's a way to manipulate the Ctrl+F/find-in-page search results.
[1] - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History_API
That is, right now you're capturing the Ctrl+F keypress and opening your own custom thing to read the user's search string and act on it. But what we'd really like is a way to be notified "The user just asked to search for 'xyz'. Would you like to capture that event, or let it go through to the browser's default behavior?"
A quick Google search found nothing like that exists yet. I then asked ChatGPT about it, hoping that ChatGPT would at least hallucinate a plausible design for the API — and had mixed feelings when it didn't. It just printed that 'Browsers do not provide a way to listen for the "Find in Page" search event due to privacy and security concerns' and suggested capturing the Ctrl+F keypresses exactly as you have done.
As someone else said, it would also be more like full-text search if you also considered the primary-key column, e.g. searching for "0390814603917539994005679487460590835" should jump to the 390814603917539994005679487460590835th row. (Highlighting-to-select pieces of the text also doesn't work: I'm not sure why not, since I would have thought the browser gives you at least that part for free.)
Besides "search" not working on mobile, the styling on mobile is such that the "scrolling" does not convince: to my eyes it looks too obviously like "changing the values in the cells of a fixed table" as opposed to "scrolling through the table itself." You could maybe mitigate that by animating quickly among three different page layouts with the table vertically offset by different amounts.
It occurs to me that if JavaScript has something like Python's `random.sample`-without-replacement, then you could set your `RANDOM_SEARCH_ITERATIONS` to 256 and achieve perfectly consistent (and exhaustive) "search" when the user has entered all but 1 or 2 hex digits of their desired result. And/or, you could just have the page secretly keep a history of the search results the user has already seen: this would prevent the user from finding out so quickly that "search + next + next + prev + prev" doesn't always get them back to where they started.
Speaking of exhaustive search results: With a bit more (probably equally algorithmically interesting) work, you could emulate the browser search's "7/256" by tallying up the number of UUIDs satisfying the constraint, e.g. if the user has typed "1234567" then you could display "1234567 (158456324585806817418058661888 results)" and maybe even fake up a convincing position indicator like "1234567 (17415833585801881134805987465/158456324585806817418058661888)". I guess if you display it as "1234567 (1.742e28/1.585e29)" then you don't even have to cheat that much. :)