@guy038 said:
It’s kind of like I’m rediscovering the true concept of your default scope !!
Your observations are correct. I think you get how it works now… which leaves me with the problem: How do I make this obvious to users who are not going to spend nearly as much time as you have spent to understand it?
Perhaps you see why I think it is useful: not having to constantly use a menu (or a dialog) for routine things like searching in a selection, or marking text and then finding or replacing within the marked text. Also, the Settings allow users to customize it to the way they work most often.
Yet, it loses its usefulness if it is a puzzle to know when it will do what, and you have to use the drop-down anyway because you aren’t sure what the default command will do. I’m still working toward finding a design that is efficient for power users, obvious for casual users, and predictable for everyone, while remaining visually appealing.
However, I needed some time to understand what meant the option Show selected lines (Shift: All) Ctrl + Q, in the Tools dialog ! Luckily, with the Search++ documentation, I understood the difference between Ctrl + Q and Ctrl + Shift + Q
Would it be more simple to write the two lines :
Show selected lines Ctrl + Q
Show all lines Ctrl + Shift + Q
Instead of that single line ( which sometimes seems wrongly labelled Show all lines Ctrl + Q ) ?!
Without going into a lot of details, it comes down to economy of underlined letters for the menu options. (I’m reserving S, and the keyboard combination Ctrl+S, for save search.)
The menu option is labeled Show all lines when the selection (or caret if nothing is selected) occupies only lines that are already visible. In this case, there is no need to require Shift to show all lines, since showing selected lines would do nothing. It is labeled Show selected lines (Shift: all) when the selection includes text on a hidden line; then without Shift the command shows the selected line, but if you really wanted to show all lines, you can press Shift when you click to do that.
Mark selected text and Mark shown text have a similar dual function. If any text is already marked, they show (Shift: clear first) in the menu item. Using Shift clears existing marks first, while not using Shift adds to the existing marks.
All of these have keyboard accelerators using the same letter with and without the Shift key, which duplicate the functions of the menu commands.
Your new Expand visible Ctrl P, in the Tools menu, is really a nice feature. I would suggest to label this option Show one more line before and after as this command can be repeated !
(It might seem silly, but running out of letters, I spent some time thinking of a way to use “p” before I came up with “Expand” for this option. “P” was one of the few letters that was unused in both upper and lower case as a keyboard accelerator, and I plan to add a (Shift: details) option, or something similar, allowing the user to do multiple lines at a time, or different numbers of lines before and after, or perhaps something else… I haven’t decided.)
BTW, do you plan to add, in the future, such a feature to the Find All functionality ?
I hope to do that, but unlike Show, I expect that it will be necessary to specify the amount of context to be shown before and after each match before executing the Find All command.
Now, let’s say that I marked 15 occurrences of some text. As I checked the Bookmark lines when marking text option, I got 15 blue marks. If I use your new Invert marked text, all non-marked text get marked and all marked text becomes unmarked : OK
However, the bookmarks do NOT follow this new marked text. In addition, may be the option Invert marked Lines would be more interesting ! Or, possibly, the two options ?
I’ve been a little uncertain how to handle bookmarks. I don’t generally use bookmarks in Notepad++ at all, so I don’t have much sense of how people use them.
I suppose that when Bookmark lines when marking text is checked, bookmarks should follow marks. But what if you already had some bookmarks, and then you added some more when marking text. Then you do something like Invert marked lines because you want to search for something in the remaining text — are you likely to accidentally lose bookmarks you set because you forgot to turn off Bookmark lines when marking text first? (Strictly speaking, you wouldn’t lose them, but they’d be mixed in with all the other previously unmarked lines, so in effect they would be lost.)
What do you think? My thought was that the reasonable use case for Invert marked text is to restrict a search to what wasn’t found in a previous search, and that carrying bookmarks along would be more likely to be an oversight than something you wanted to do.
