Request for a small improvement of the N++ status bar !
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@cmeriaux Maybe the behavior is not intended, but all of the options/selections that were made in the Find dialog seem to be used when you do any of the various F3 hotkey searches. Here is a way to see it. Enter this into a blank document:
You will find 7{4} in Normal mode, but you will NOT find 7{4} in Regex mode.
Move the cursor to the start of the file and then press Ctrl+F and do a regular expression search for 7{4} You should not find anything. Exit the dialog, highlight 7{4} in the first line and then press F3 (or Ctrl+F3). You will not find anything. Do another Ctrl+F, switch to Normal mode, then close the dialog. Now highlight 7{4} in the first line and then press F3 (or Ctrl+F3). You should find that text in the second row.
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I agree with @Jim-Dailey on this. We are not talking here if the regular expressions search is useful in the F3 case but rather the strange results you would get from this:
- First open the Find dialog and search using regular expressions mode.
- Next, you select something in the document like word1.word2 and use F3.
Now I would expect the search to be normal but would rather get a regular expression search. At least I have forgotten what search mode is currently active and I would need to open the Find dialog again just to see and change that.
Perhaps it is reasonable to think in other direction here - should the Find dialog options be preserved and used in the F3 case?
Perhaps we might need Status bar with different search options that are actually affecting only the quick searches (F3 and company).And finally, my opinion as expressed before is that ALL search options that remain active / affect the F3 search should be present in the Status bar to at least give you a clue what you are searching for. Nobody would like to miss a match just because some option somewhere he had forgotten about is not in the proper state.
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Hi All,
Thank you, all, for your interest about my request. I’ll try, in that post, to get a summary and raise some other ideas !
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A) I, personally, think that, IF the status bar should content, ONLY, the two states of the Word only and Match case flags, the @scott-sumner’s formulation, below, seems to be a common-sense solution to everyone !
+W / +C
-W / +C
+W / -C
-W / -C
May be, Scott, the displaying could be, even, shortened, with, at least, two spaces, between the two options, for easy changes, on mouse clicking, as shown below :
+W +C -W +C +W -C -W -C
- B) As @jim-dailey and @pnedev, I think, however, that we should display all the flags, in the status bar. Indeed, although I agree, with Scott, that all flags are not needed, in all cases, some of them may be useful, in some cases !
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C) To @jim-dailey and @pnedev : Like you, I, first, thought about the uppercase/lowercase difference, for displaying the two states of some flags. But, as shown below, some letters have an uppercase glyph really different from its lowercase glyph and some others haven’t. And, unfortunately, the
W
,C
andP
letters rather belong to the second category :-((UPPER / LOWER case letters QUITE different : A a B b D d E e F f G g H h M m N n Q q R r T t
UPPER / LOWER case letters NOT MUCH different : C c I i J j K k L l O o P p S s U u V v W w X x Y y Z z
Of course, it’s just a first and personal impression, that you may not share at all !
However I agree with you : we should not increase the number of symbols displayed. So, what about the displaying, below ?
N D | W C | A E d | w c | a R A
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The first one would stand for the search mode (
N
,E
,R
orA
, as DOT matches Any character ) -
The second one would stand for the direction (
D
for “Down” ORd
for “Up” ) -
The third one would stand for the Whole word option (
W
for “Whole word only” ORw
for “No Whole xord only” ) -
The fourth one would stand for the Match case option (
C
for “Match case” ORc
for “No Match case” ) -
The fifth one would stand for the Wrap around option (
A
for “Wrap around” ORa
for “No wrap around” )
REMARK :
Does anyone know if it"s possible, technically, to colour these letters in the status bar ? Or, may be, to underline letters, in status bar, like in menus, when we’re using the ALT key ?
In that case, a capital letter
C
would mean that the Match case option is set and an underlined capitalC
would mean that the Match case option in unset !
I change my mind and consider, by now, that two pipe characters look better as separators, than two hyphens ! As I said before, these two characters make visible the logical parts of the search process :
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The first part ( mode and direction options ) rather concerns the search process, itself
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The second part ( Whole word and Match case options ) concerns, basically, the Find what zone
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The final part ( Wrap around option ) concerns the action to perform, when the top /bottom of file is reached
- D) To @cmeriaux : The totality of the flags, even the spaces and the separators characters, take only 15 characters long. With my suggestion, about the EOL characters displaying, in my first post, we could already get back 9 spaces. To my mind, it shouldn’t be very difficult to get six extra spaces positions !
- E) To @cmeriaux, @jim-dailey and @pnedev : Indeed, as you, I think that, on using the Select and Find feature (
Ctrl + Shift + F3
orCtrl + F3
shortcuts ) the search should be run, automatically, in NORMAL mode, without updating the last user choice, done in the Find dialog. This would suppress all the odd results, obtained for the first matched string !!
- F) To All : What do you think of this new option, in the Find/Replace/Mark dialog :
Close F/R dialog, on first match
. By this means, we could, at once, after the first match, go on searching, with theF3
orShift + F3
shortcut :-))
Best Regards,
guy038
P.S. : Two more points :
- 1)
As said above, the Select and Find feature depends of all the options, previously defined in the Find dialog
So, it’s important to note that, contrary to the Select and Find feature, the Find ( Volatile ) feature is, automatically and always, performed, with the following options :
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NORMAL mode
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Case SENSITIVE
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NO WHOLE word only
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WRAP around
and this, WITHOUT changing the present state of these four options, in the Find dialog, NOR thesearch expression, itself ( Volatile, isn’t it ? )
- 2)
Do you know the main difference between the Find ( Volatile ) and the Select and Find features ? Well :
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The Find ( Volatile ) feature does NOT affect the continued search process, with the
Shift + F3
orF3
shortcuts -
The Select and Find feature DOES affect the continued search process, by remembering this search, for further matches, with the present options of the Find dialog, on hitting the
Shift + F3
orF3
shortcut.
This explains why, contrary to the Find ( Volatile ) feature, which exploits its own fixed options, the Select and Find feature is dependant on the Find dialog’s options, and, especially, on the search mode !
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Point (E), which was @cmeriaux’s suggestion originally, is a good one!
Point (F)…is an excellent suggestion. I’m coming to Notepad++ after using Multiedit for almost 20 years. One of the hardest things to get used to in that transition was the Find dialog staying open after you tell it to Find something. It should close until I want it again (shifting input focus to the current editor tab), at which point I can bring it up with a single shortcut. I know I can close it with Esc, but I’ve never gotten used to doing that.
Another Find dialog situation that frustrates me that point (F) would solve: I’ve specified my text and it has done the first find for me, and I’ve put the focus back the in an document tab. If I use shortcut keys to find successive matches, all is good until no more matches are found. At this point (here comes the frustrating part), focus is returned to the Find dialog! This only happens with the Find dialog still open; Notepad++ won’t re-open a closed Find dialog…but I just want the window border to flash at the end of matches, regardless of whether the Find dialog is open or not