Search++: A work in progress

guy038

Hello, @coises and All,

I’m presently testing your new Search++ plugin : really awesome ;-))

I’ll share my first impressions with you in a few hours. Many thanks for this new valuable plugin !

Best Regards,

guy038

Michael Vincent

@Coises said in Search++: A work in progress:

I present Search++ as a work in progress:

At first I thought you were resurrecting the old SearchPlus plugin. Ironically, you had to “search” online for it since it wasn’t included in Plugin Manager (Manager, not Admin at the time).

In any case, your ++ version seems to have way more capabilities already and it’s just “a work in progress”.

Cheers.

guy038

Hi, @coises and All,

First impressions :

Regarding the menus : in order to harmonize all the sub-menus :

I suppose that the Find sub-menus could be expressed as below :

Find Forward                         or  Find                  
Find Forward in Selection            or  Find in Selection     
Find Forward in Marked Text          or  Find in Marked Text   
Find Forward in Whole Document       or  Find in Whole Document
----------------------------------------------------------------
Find Backward
Find Backward in Selection
Find Backward in Marked Text
Find Backward in Whole Document

Similarly, the Replace dialog could be expressed as below :

Replace and Find Forward                     or  Replace and Find                   
Replace and Find Forward in Selection        or  Replace and Find in Selection
Replace and Find Forward in Marked Text      or  Replace and Find in Marked Text
Replace and Find Forward in Whole Document   or  Replace and Find in Whole Document
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Replace and Find Backward
Replace and Find Backward in Selection
Replace and Find Backward in Marked Text
Replace and Find Backward in Whole Document
-------------------------------------------------------
Find or Replace Forward                      or  Find or Replace                   
Find or Replace Forward in Selection         or  Find or Replace in Selection
Find or Replace Forward in Marked Text       or  Find or Replace in Marked Text
Find or Replace Forward in Whole Document    or  Find or Replace in Whole Document
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Find or Replace Backward
Find or Replace Backward in Selection
Find or Replace Backward in Marked Text
Find or Replace Backward in Whole Document

Finally, I think that the Count and Replace All menus should adopt the same presentation as the Find All / Mark / Select / Show sub-menus, i.e. :

Count All
Count Before
Count After
--------------------------------
Count All in Selection
--------------------------------
Count All in Marked Text
Count Before in MArked Text
Count After in Marked Text
--------------------------------
Count All in Whole Document
Count BeFore in Whole Document
Count After in Whole Document

And

Replace All
Replace All Before
Replace All After
----------------------------------------
Replace All in Selection
----------------------------------------
Replace All in Marked Text
Replace All Before in MArked Text
Replace All After in Marked Text
----------------------------------------
Replace All in Whole Document
Replace All Before in Whole Document
Replace All After in Whole Document

Regarding the Search++ results panel :

I’m a bit annoyed to not be able to clear this panel at any time and that I need to close and re-open a N++ session to that purpose ! Personally, an option in the Tools menu, to clear the Search++ Results panel would be great !

Regarding the search direction :

I do appreciate to temporarily reverse the search direction, with native N++ search, by hitting or releasing the Shift key ! Would it be possible to add this functionality to Search++ plugin ?

Regarding the button’s labels :
First, I would say that the possibility to change the default value of a button by hitting the Shift key while clicking on a specific sub-menu, is very interesting !

After testing all the cases, I noticed that :

The Backward direction is noted with the ← arrow, in the Find and Replace sub-menus
The Forward direction is noted with the → arrow, in the Find and Replace sub-menus
The Before indication is noted with the ↑ arrow, in the Count, Find All / Mark / Select / Show and Replace All sub-menus
The After indication is noted with the ↓ arrow, in the Count, Find All / Mark / Select / Show and Replace All sub-menus
The All/Everywhere indication is noted with the ↕ arrow, in the Count, Find All / Mark / Select / Show and Replace All sub-menus

However, the indications for Selection, Marked text and Whole document, at beginning of buttons, are rather difficult to visualize : May be, a different and distinctive shape and/or color would be welcome ! I put the 3 cases in a single picture and they look as below :

400912e6-5887-4161-8170-929b31cf0b74-Capture d'écran 2026-03-27 215714.png

The Find button is preceded by the Whole Document mark
The Count button is preceded by the Marked Text mark
The Find All button is preceded by the Selection mark

I’ve begun to study the purpose of each sub-menu ( not so obvious ! ) and I’ll probably ask you about some weird behaviours in a next post

Best Regards,

guy038

Coises

@guy038 said in Search++: A work in progress:

I’ve begun to study the purpose of each sub-menu ( not so obvious ! )

This section of the help might help.

I think it indeed might be a little more confusing than it needs to be, but I haven’t found the magic formula to simplify it yet.

I omitted “All” from the commands other than Find All and Replace All because they can’t be step-wise… you can’t Count the next match. So in a logical sense, I’m thinking that “Find” and ”Find All” are two different things (not that “Find All” is “Find” with “All” added as a modifier). But it is potentially confusing.

Backward and Before sound awfully similar, as do Forward and After… but Backward and Forward are for single step searches while Before and After are for multiple-result searches. It is not as intuitive as I wish it were.

You are right, clear is missing from the results list and it should be there. I’ll probably put it on the right-click menu for the search results, with something as a keyboard shortcut. To go with that, unless there’s some reason it doesn’t work as I would hope, I’ll probably want to enable Undo/Redo so that if you inadvertently clear the results, you can recover them.

(Oh, I should mention that there is a version 0.2 that fixes a couple reported issues and a couple more I found while fixing those.)

Coises

I said in Search++: A work in progress:

I omitted “All” from the commands other than Find All and Replace All because they can’t be step-wise… you can’t Count the next match. So in a logical sense, I’m thinking that “Find” and ”Find All” are two different things (not that “Find All” is “Find” with “All” added as a modifier). But it is potentially confusing.

@guy038 and anyone else reading:

Would it be more clear, less clear or equally impenetrable if I changed “Find All” to “List”?

When you think of it, “Find All” is not the result of doing “Find” multiple times. It’s an entirely different operation: listing matches in the results window. On the other hand, it’s the phrase that’s familiar.

The other verbs on that button are all single words not used anywhere else — Mark, Select and Show — so “List” would have a certain symmetry.

I’m sort of talking myself into changing it, but I wonder if others think that would just add to the mystery?

“Replace All” at least really is the result of doing the same thing as “Replace,” but as many times as possible, so that’s at least consistent.

Should there be an option to add a list of replacements done by “Replace All” to the search results list? If so, should that be a button alternative (that’s what I would think) or a setting?

I hate the “Replace and Find” vs “Find or Replace” naming, but I have not been able to think of a clear and concise way to express what each does. (If it is not obvious to anyone reading, they are the comparable to Notepad++ Replace with “Replace: Don’t move to the following occurrence” unchecked or checked.) Both do a Find unless a Find was already done just before. (In a similar way, though not internally quite the same, as Columns++, and differently from Notepad++, this is checked by monitoring whether the selection is changed, not by repeating the Find. That’s what makes it possible for \K to work in stepwise Find/Replace.)

So they are really “Find if you didn’t just find, otherwise replace and then find” and “find if you didn’t just find, otherwise replace (and stay put so I can see what just happened).”

Coises

@guy038 said in Search++: A work in progress:

I do appreciate to temporarily reverse the search direction, with native N++ search, by hitting or releasing the Shift key ! Would it be possible to add this functionality to Search++ plugin ?

Yes, that makes sense for the step-wise Find and Replace buttons in the plain text search. I don’t think there’s any reason I can’t make it work.

guy038

Hello @coises and All,

Regarding the bug of Search++_01, I did verify that all is fixes in Search++_02 and I also verified that it’s OK with the Columns++ plugin !

Regarding changing the Find All name :

Of course, I suppose that you could change the Find All label by the List label. However note that the Find All in Current Document option, the Find All in All Opened Documents option and the Find All option of N++ search begin all with the string Find All. Thus, I think the change would rather disturb some people !

Regarding the inclusion of the results of the Replace All option in the search++ results :

To my mind, this extra work does not seem necessary, at first ! On the other hand, you always have the possibility to re-do a Find All search, using the previous replace expression. However, if this functionnallity seems important to you, just go ahead !

Regarding hding all lines of a file :

Let’s hide all the contents of a file 1, with the option in the Tools panel
Switch to an other file 2
Switch back to file 1

All the lines of file 1 are visible again : I suppose that this behaviour is the one that you expect, don’t you ?

Regarding the Mark functionnality :
Let’s mark some text with the native N++ Mark dialog with the Bookmark line option checked
If you use the Unmark All Text option of the Tools panel, it correctly clear all the marks. However, it does not clear the associated bookmarks !

I think of two possible solutions :

Clear all the bookmarks, as well
Add a new Clear bookmarks option

Now, let suppose this text :

 1  foo
 2  bar
 3  foo
 4  bar
 5  foo
 6  bar
 7  foo
 8  bar
 9  bar
10  foo
11  bar
12  bar
13  foo

I first did a selection from line 4 bar to line 9 bar

With the word foo in the search dialog, I first run a Mark in Selection option
Now, if I use the Find in Marked Text option, I do get the first word foo of the selection ( Line 5 foo )
Clicking again on the Find in Marked Text option, I do get the second word foo of the selection ( Line 7 foo )
Clicking a third time on the Find in Marked Text option, I correctly get the message No matches found (Find again to search all marked text)
Clicking a fourth time on the Find in Marked Text option, it does match again the first word foo of the Marked Text region ( Line 5 foo )

That correspond to what you say in the Help documenation :

Marked Text: If there is any marked text, ONLY marked text will be searched;

Now, let’s use the new text below :

 1          foo
 2          bar
 3          foo
 4          bar
 5          foo
 6          bar
 7          foo
 8          bar
 9          bar
10          foo
11          bar
12          bar
13          foo

I first do a stream selection from line 4 bar to line 9 bar. Note that this selection does contain more than 80 characters and 3 lines ! ( 102 chars / 6 lines ) and then should be considered as a true selection !
Now, if I use the Find in Selection option, I do get the first word foo of the selection ( Line 5 ... foo )
Clicking again on the Find in Selection option, I do get the second word foo of the selection ( Line 7 ... foo )
Clicking a third time on the Find in Selection option, it matches the word foo, outside the selection ( Line 10 ... foo )

( I was expecting the message No matches found (Find again to search in selection)

Clicking a fourth time on the Find in Selection option, it matches the word foo, outside the selection ( Line 13 ... foo )

( I was expecting, again, a match of the first word foo of the selection ( Line 5 ... foo ) ) !

Indeed, you say in the Help documenation :

If there is a non-empty selection — single, rectangular or multiple — the search will be confined to the selected text.

May be, @coises,I just did not exactly understand the Selection concept ?

Best Regards,

guy038

Coises

@guy038 said in Search++: A work in progress:

Let’s hide all the contents of a file 1, with the option in the Tools panel

Switch to an other file 2

Switch back to file 1

All the lines of file 1 are visible again : I suppose that this behaviour is the one that you expect, don’t you ?

@guy038, thank you so much for all your thoughts and your tests. They are an immense help.

I see there is a potential problem here, without a simple solution. It looks like Notepad++ saves and restores hidden lines, but it tracks them when it hides them or shows them, so it is unaware of any changes in state made by a plugin. It not only doesn’t restore lines hidden in Search++, if you hide lines in Notepad++ and then find them in Search++, they wind up hidden again when you switch tabs away and back.

Ugh. This could be really messy. :-(

Let’s mark some text with the native N++ Mark dialog with the Bookmark line option checked

If you use the Unmark All Text option of the Tools panel, it correctly clear all the marks. However, it does not clear the associated bookmarks !

I think of two possible solutions :

Clear all the bookmarks, as well

Add a new Clear bookmarks option

Unless it doesn’t work for some reason (I haven’t tried it yet), I think Notepad++’s own Search | Bookmark | Clear all bookmarks can handle that.

May be, @coises,I just did not exactly understand the Selection concept ?

It sounds like I need to clarify what happens a little more in the help. Short answer: the first Find selects the text it found, which wipes out the original selection; it’s not possible to search within a selection that doesn’t exist, so subsequent searches revert to searching the whole document.

This traces back to some discussion about search in early Columns++. The purpose of having a search function there was to make it possible to search and replace in column selections, which Notepad++ search will not do. @Alan-Kilborn observed some unexpected behavior and suggested using what Scintilla calls an indicator. (Notepad++ calls it marked text or a style… both style and mark mean something different from indicator in Scintilla, so keeping the words straight is an ongoing challenge.)

The fundamental operation of Find (step-wise) is to select what was found. You can’t have a selection within a selection; the original selection is lost when you do the first Find. My original attempt at solving this in Columns++ — by “memorizing” the original selection and using it for subsequent finds — did not work well. After Alan’s suggestion, I switched to “Search in Indicated Region” and set a marked region from the column selection. Eventually I wound up with some features for controlling the indicated region incorporated into the search dialog, and some complicated rules (described here under the heading “Other controls in the Search dialog”) to make it so that users can almost forget about the indicator, even though every search in Columns++ must happen within an indicated region.

One of my goals in Search++ was/is to get rid of the imposition of an “indicated region” (now just called “marked text”) on users who aren’t thinking in those terms.

The rough equivalent to Selection -> Region | Auto set in Columns++ (which is checked by default) is Settings | Convert selections to marked text before beginning a stepwise search in Search++ (which is not, at present, checked by default).

Given my experience with Columns++, I don’t plan to attempt to restrict search to a “memorized” selection that no longer exists. Either you convert the selection to marked text, let Search++ convert it for you, or only the first step-wise Find will be confined to the original selection.

Vitalii Dovgan

This is very interesting!

Maybe you’ll also consider an alternate UI (in addition to the main one) in a form of a small one-line search panel similar to the one in Sublime Text or similar to this one:
https://github.com/d0vgan/AkelPad-Plugs-QSearch

To be honest, now I prefer the Incremental Search panel in Noteped++ to the Find dialog because the Incremental Search panel occupies much less space, even though it’s not that powerful as the Find dialog.
The painful points of the Incremental Search panel are:

it does not clear the last word or the entire Find What field by Ctrl+Backspace. Instead, a stupid unreadable symbol is inserted. (Yes, I know, Microsoft forces us to write own handler of Ctrl+Backspace in each and every instance of an Edit control, what a shame),
it does not forward Ctrl+Tab to the main window, thus not allowing to switch between tabs while in the Incremental Search panel.

guy038

Hello, @coises and All,

Regarding the Bookmarks :

I’m pretty dumb for not thinking of the N++ native command Search > Bookmark > Clear All Bookmarks or even better : a right mouse click within the Bookmark margin with the same option !

Regarding the selection concept :

Many thanks for your explanations. So, if I understand you clearly, we need to transform the selection(s) in Marked Text, first and then use the Find in Mark Text option

In your initial post, near the end of the Features section, you said :

Regular expression searches in Search++ perform a fully Unicode-based search using a customized combination of Boost.Regex and ICU4C. In particular, this produces fewer “surprising” results with Unicode characters above 0xFFFF (including most emoji) and when searching in documents using a DBCS code page (which in Notepad++ can be Chinese, Japanese or Korean files that are in the system default encoding instead of in Unicode).

Then, at the end of the Quirks and features ... section :

The ICU button at the top is there mostly for testing. It uses the regular expression engine built into ICU, which has different syntax than the familiar Boost.Regex engine and does not integrate as well with Scintilla. Replace is not implemented for this search engine, and it only works on Unicode documents. It will probably be removed when Search++ reaches version 1.0, as it really isn’t very useful except as a check on the results from the main Regex engine (since I’ve meddled with the main Regex engine quite a lot, and I haven’t modified the ICU engine in any way).

And later, at the end of the Missing and Planned Features ... section :

I hope to add more features to the regular expression search. The current version is almost identical to the search in Columns++, but presented in what is hopefully a more flexible and user-friendly interface. It should be more accurate for Unicode-derived properties since it uses ICU4C directly instead of working from the home-grown parse of Unicode tables used in Columns++. If I can work out a way, I hope to add Unicode word breaks and more Unicode properties.

So, some questions :

When clicking on the Regex button, do we use your Unicode search engine, as in Columns++ or is it a mix of the Columns++ version and ICU
Oddly, if we choose the ICU button, the Replace and Replace All buttons are not greyed and seem functional, contrary to what you said ?!
Can you recommend a few websites, speaking about ICU and the Unicode Word Boundaries specificity ?
Presently, when hitting the ICU button, do searches like \p{alphabetic} or \p[XID_Continue} are possible against my Total_Chars file of 325,590 characters ?

TIA for all your answers !

Best Regards,

guy038

Coises

@Vitalii-Dovgan said in Search++: A work in progress:

Maybe you’ll also consider an alternate UI (in addition to the main one) in a form of a small one-line search panel

Probably not one line, but reasonably compact should be possible. At present you can dock the docking Search++ dialog to the top or bottom instead of the left or right, if you like that better. The layout adapts, but it doesn’t use the full width as well as it could — right now there are only horizontal and vertical layouts, and I need to work out an “ultra-wide” layout that puts all the buttons and check boxes into a single row when the dialog is wide enough. I don’t see any reason that can’t be done, though.

The painful points of the Incremental Search panel are:

it does not clear the last word or the entire Find What field by Ctrl+Backspace. Instead, a stupid unreadable symbol is inserted. (Yes, I know, Microsoft forces us to write own handler of Ctrl+Backspace in each and every instance of an Edit control, what a shame),

Search++ does that now. (That must be the default command for Ctrl+Backspace in Scintilla, since I did nothing special to make it work. I’ve never used Ctrl+Backspace.)

it does not forward Ctrl+Tab to the main window, thus not allowing to switch between tabs while in the Incremental Search panel.

I see regular Notepad++ search doesn’t do that either. (It uses Ctrl+Tab to switch dialog tabs, though, so that makes sense.) Search++ doesn’t do it now; I don’t know if it’s possible (particularly from a docked dialog) but I will see if it can be done.

At present you can switch rapidly to the main Notepad++ window with Ctrl+N. If you’ve set a shortcut for Search++ you can then use that to switch back again. I know that’s still extra keystrokes, so I will see if Ctrl+Tab can be forwarded, since it’s not used for anything in Search++.

Thank you for your observations and suggestions!

Vitalii Dovgan

@Coises
It should be possible to forward Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab by processing WM_KEYDOWN with VK_TAB in your dialog’s DlgProc similarly to this:
https://github.com/d0vgan/AkelPad-Plugs-QSearch/blob/master/Source/QSearch/QSearchDlg.c#L4569

Interestingly, the Right Ctrl key often emulates Ctrl+Alt, so when you verify only the presence of VK_TAB and VK_CONTROL (like in the code mentioned above), this code also works for RightCtrl+Tab which becomes VK_TAB and VK_CONTROL and VK_MENU. (VK_MENU is the Alt key. Unlike the real Alt key that comes under WM_SYSKEYDOWN, the “Ctrl+Alt” from RightCtrl comes under WM_KEYDOWN).

Oh, WM_KEYUP should be handled as well:
https://github.com/d0vgan/AkelPad-Plugs-QSearch/blob/master/Source/QSearch/QSearchDlg.c#L4607

Coises

@guy038 said in Search++: A work in progress:

So, if I understand you clearly, we need to transform the selection(s) in Marked Text, first and then use the Find in Mark Text option

Yes; or click the Tools button, open Settings and check Convert selections to marked text before beginning a stepwise search to have Search++ do it automatically. Otherwise, multiple searches that don’t affect the selection (like Count or Find All or Replace All) will work within the selection, but only the first stepwise Find (or the preliminary find in a stepwise Replace) will be constrained to the selection, since after that the original selection will be gone.

When clicking on the Regex button, do we use your Unicode search engine, as in Columns++ or is it a mix of the Columns++ version and ICU

It’s the Columns++ search engine, except for one thing. Previously I could not figure out how to incorporate ICU4C into the plugin, so for Columns++ I devised a Python program that reads several of the Unicode character data files and writes C++ code that compiles into a gigantic table containing the information I needed. I stumbled on the way to use ICU4C shortly before I began working on Search++; instead of building and using those tables, I go straight to ICU4C for information (questions like, “What is the general category of this character?” or ”Is this a lower case character?”).

It might turn out that this will have an efficiency impact (better or worse? — I don’t know). It should fix some of the errors in Columns++, like [[:lower:]] missing characters that are lower case but not letters.

Oddly, if we choose the ICU button, the Replace and Replace All buttons are not greyed and seem functional, contrary to what you said ?!

They’re not disabled, but all they do is return the message, “Command not implemented.”

Can you recommend a few websites, speaking about ICU and the Unicode Word Boundaries specificity ?

I don’t really have anything except the Unicode documentation. In my brief testing, the practical effect in English is that words like can't are recognized as a single word. Most regular expression engines define a word boundary (\b) in terms of what is a word character (\w). The regular expression engine in ICU lets you do that, but it also provides an option to use Unicode word boundaries to define \b.

Presently, when hitting the ICU button, do searches like \p{alphabetic} or \p[XID_Continue} are possible against my Total_Chars file of 325,590 characters ?

Yes. You can even use things like \p{script=Greek}. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any place where ICU documents its own regular expression syntax. The regular-expressions.info web site includes ICU among the regex dialects it shows.