@guy038 said:
Personally, your concept of a default scope bothers me a little, because it’s hard for me to know, in advance, which actions will be automatically selected by the plugin !
(It occurs to me that perhaps I should call it “adaptive” rather than “default” scope. Within the program code I called it “Smart,” but by the time I got the help and UI together I decided that word sounded too pretentious.)
The uncertainty about what action a button will perform bothers me, too. I’m still trying to think of a way to mitigate that. I think the idea of an adaptive scope is useful, but I don’t like that you can’t confirm what actual command a button with adaptive (default) scope will perform at a glance, before clicking it.
You just show six one-letter buttons and two one-letter button for the replace actions, as below :
|F| |C| |A| |S| |M| |H| : Find Count find All Select Mark sHow
|R| |A| Replace replace All
All these simple-design buttons would open a common dialog box, in which the selected action — one of the eight possible options — would be already selected by default. This dialogue could be based on the table shown above !
Then, you’ll just have to check your present scope and extent choices for the chosen action
Optionally a message, summarizing everything that has just been selected, could be displayed
Then, this new dialog would end with three buttons :
A Define button to attribute a default configuration ( scope and extent ) for the chosen action, without any execution.
A Run button to start the chosen action, without any default configuration to apply to
And, of course, a Cancel button, or an hit on the ESC key, to dismiss the chosen action
In other words, no more drop-down menus ! Instead, a new configuration dialog to confirm the default scope and extent values of the chosen action AND / OR the execution of the chosen action, with the present options checked in the scope and extent sections
There are surely some drawbacks to my proposal ! Anyway, what’s your feeling about this radical change ?
At first I thought you meant every single action would require clicking a button, looking at a dialog to verify the options are what you want, then clicking a button in the dialog to actually do the action. What is now Find, Find, Find would become F, dialog opens, check defaults (change them if wrong and Define), Run, F, dialog opens, Run, F, dialog opens, Run. That would be way too much interruption of flow for a user doing simple things.
Of course, you could, in one go, click first on the Define button, then click on the Run button
Since this implies that Define does not close the dialog, perhaps you also intend that Run does not close the dialog. That would allow for repetitive actions, at the expense of having this dialog (in addition to the main Search++ dialog) on the screen while doing them, and having to click another button to close it after the last or only action.
I’m sorry, but it sounds to me as if it would be very clumsy to use. Dialogs are even more of an interruption than menus. It would also defeat the purpose of a docking dialog if another dialog has to be raised to actually do anything… unless it is also docking…
In my opinion, the main buttons must do something that’s usually useful with a single click. To what degree that should be “adaptive” (e.g., in selection when there is a “large enough” selection) is debatable: adaptation increases the chance that you can do what you want with a single click, but also increases the chance that what a single click does won’t be what you expected.
I think six buttons under the find box would be too busy, making it harder for the user to immediately identify and click the desired button. A busy layout doesn’t bother me as much with something like the Settings dialog (which, I admit, is horrible) that you don’t open often, but for something that’s meant to be used frequently, maybe even kept open in a docking panel, visual simplicity is important.
For what it’s worth, you can get some aspects of your idea now. Just use Shift+click on each drop-down menu to choose a command that does not use default scope as the command for the button. Click the button when you want to Run what you already have set. If you want to Run a different command, select it from the drop-down. If you want to Define and Run a different command, Shift+click it in the drop-down. (There is no equivalent to Define without Run.)
Additionally, in the Settings dialog you can uncheck Default commands automatically search within selections. and Default commands automatically search within marked text. to disable the adaptive mechanism, so that default scope is always Whole Document and even if you select a plain command (Find, Count, etc.) Search++ will never infer anything other than Whole Document.
