You bring up a good point. I can see this becoming difficult to deal with if you have many nodes and labels. However, I tried to make this mimic the existing GUI of Hudson as much as I could. The Hudson native feature: "Tie this project to node" was my inspiration. It ties nodes for freestyle, non-Matrix jobs with a drop-down list, too.

I suppose that the best way to deal with many entries, is to use the control's awareness of the starting letter of each entry: If you type 's', it will instantly select the next node/lable that begins with 's'.

Your answer is valid. However, I'll try bringing up this isse in a more general way with JENKINS-7028 then. From my experience, forning a special naming scheme on things just to make the certain GUI list behave better is a bad approach in the long term. This mixes up different aspects that could easily be addressed in the appropriate modules.