[bau5]

You can tell someone is copying someone else's work when they copy the bad stuff. The search box on GitHub and now GitLab wastes space with "This repository" spelled out. It's also odd that you get more space to type when you're not searching inside of a repo, and that backspace is how you switch to a more general search. Pity. I thought that GitLab had learned their lesson and stopped copying GitHub.

Aside from that, it sounds like a well thought out feature, and it's good that they're redoing it instead of just changing it bit by bit.

[ecma]

Even if they have taken UI cues from elsewhere, I don't think this is a bad one. The search box is in the global context section and it's important to signal that it's going to behave in a non-global way. Having a flexible width text input or making it expand over the 'This Repository' hint (or whatever other context hint is there at the time) would be an easy solve for it being too small.

[Sir_Substance]

>You can tell someone is copying someone else's work when they copy the bad stuff.

Once people learn a UI, they really hate deviations from it. It doesn't matter whether githubs UI is good, and it doesn't matter whether gitlab's UI is better. People are used to github, and the peanut gallery will bitch if things are different. The trick for gitlab will be in finding the UI differences that give the maximum improvement for the minimum change. That's what will give the desired sensation of "clearly better than github". Overdo it, and it'll feel alien and weird.

[svesselov]

"The trick for gitlab will be in finding the UI differences that give the maximum improvement for the minimum change."

This is the holy grail of UI for sure. We are striving for this in all of the decisions we make on the UX team. This change required a lot more change than we would have liked but we are implementing it in a way that we hope will bring maximum effectiveness and longevity.

[webmaven]

> Once people learn a UI, they really hate deviations from it. It doesn't matter whether githubs UI is good, and it doesn't matter whether gitlab's UI is better. People are used to github

This used to be called the "do it like Amazon" rule, which was valid until about 2004-2005 or so.

[mi100hael]

> backspace is how you switch to a more general search

I actually love this feature on GitHub and wish it was a universally-accepted UX pattern so I could do it places like Amazon to remove the pre-selected category in their search bar. The convenience of the backspace outweighs the space the label takes in the search bar IMO, though GitHub could have made it smaller by shortening it to something like "this repo"