> Making a custom form control with JavaScript is going to make life worse for a lot of people. Just don’t do it. The browser’s built-in controls are quite sufficient.
For my self-hosted minimal CRM (not really ready for anybody except me yet) [Aktenkoffer](https://github.com/svkurowski/aktenkoffer), I created a custom select that allows for filtering/searching of contacts when choosing sender/recipient for a given document. I don't use browser's select because:
1. There's a lot of contacts one has, and the list will become very long, a usecase for which select seems not to be the best fit, i.e. I don't want to load all the options always.
2. I cannot always remember how I formatted a contact name - e.g did I include the "Dr." at the beginning or not. Select quick-selection only works when I know exactly the sequence of characters I'm looking for (like the US state selection the author mentioned).
Obviously it has tons of feature gaps, I.e. pressing Esc does not close it (yet), up-and-down arrows don't work (yet), one cannot just type to go to one option.
Any suggestions, what to do in such a case? And how I can learn more about such approaches?
I love sourcehut, and its design and I would like to follow a closer to the browser, minimal UI but in practice it seems quite hard for me - harder than getting a custom select "half-right".