I have menu sorting turned off in my config.ini, and one irritant side-effect of this is that using the alpha keys in playlist menus is much less useful than in the default case.

The other day, I was doing a search by title, and it occurred to me, "WIBNI typing letters into playlist menus worked the same way?" (yes, I do think in acronyms...)

So, for example, pressing 2 in a playlist menu would filter to the items that begin with A, B, C, or 2 (i.e. [abc2].* in regexp notation), and then pressing 3 would filter down to [abc2][def3].*, and so on. I'm omitting accented and capital letters here for clarity, but they would work as in search. Cancel would act as a delete key, until all letters were deleted, when it would revert to being "parent menu" again.

One obvious problem with this is that in search, the letters selected so far are highlighted, but this isn't possible in menus because highlighting is used to indicate the current selection. Instead, each filtered playlist could appear as a child of the previous playlist (so pressing a letter key would bring up a new transient sub-menu). This WBN, because the behaviour of Cancel would suddenly become consistent again.

What do people think of this?