Actions for bookmark in Mark box.
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The Find family of window tabs has one job; to Find/Replace/Mark data.
What one does with the data after that point is a separate functionality, and it is reasonable that it is in a separate place. My 2c. -
@Alan-Kilborn said in Actions for bookmark in Mark box.:
has one job; to Find/Replace/Mark data
Technically I suppose that is THREE jobs, not one. :-)
But the spirit of my original comment remains:
Probably not a lot of users use bookmarks (but who really knows); burdening the Mark window with more bookmark functionality than Bookmark line seems misplaced to me.
But maybe I am warming to the idea of a 5th tab “Bookmarks”(?) with buttons to activate these functions?
It does seem sort of labor intensive to navigate the menus to get to the bookmark manipulation commands. -
@Alan-Kilborn said in Actions for bookmark in Mark box.:
It does seem sort of labor intensive to navigate the menus to get to the bookmark manipulation commands.
I would agree. I think @Dat-Tran-Tan should follow the instructions in the FAQ to make a feature request. (In the past, sometimes a regular here would make the request for the person who originally posted, but there are certain recent statements by the developer that indicate feature-requests by random users, rather than by regular contributors, are given more weight.) And @Dat-Tran-Tan , remember to link to this discussion in your feature request, maybe summarizing some of the alternate implementations discussed here, and don’t forget to come back here and paste a link to the issue after you create it.
burdening the Mark window with more bookmark functionality than Bookmark line seems misplaced to me.
It makes it more crowded, yes; but the Mark tab only has 3 buttons so far, compared to the 5 in Find and Replace tabs.
But maybe I am warming to the idea of a 5th tab “Bookmarks”(?) with buttons to activate these functions?
I’m not sure it really needs a separate tab – having the action of bookmarking the lines on the Mark tab, but the actions performed with the bookmarks is on a separate “Bookmarks” tab could get annoying: analogous having to go to the Find tab to highlight the matches and then switch to the Replace tab to do the replacement, but then have to go back to Find again to highlight the next match before going to Replace to change the text.
Personally, marking and bookmarking may have entered my toolbox earlier (and they are still barely in my common-use) had it been more obvious (like in the multi-purpose dialog box) what I could do with marked or bookmarked lines; having the actions buried in submenus not directly related to the marking or bookmarking creates a mental barrier to starting to use those features.
As a compromise, maybe create one button “Act on Bookmarked Lines” that takes you to a second modal dialog which has the buttons for all the “Bookmarks” submenu actions; have that button only activated when the “Bookmark lines” checkbox is enabled.Or, if you really want a fifth tab, then remove the “Bookmark lines”, and have the action of setting bookmarks be in the same tab as the buttons that act on the bookmarks:
Find What: ____________ [<<PREV][>>NEXT] [Bookmark All] [Clear Bookmarks] [Inverse Bookmarks] [Cut][Copy] [Paste Over Lines]
You don’t really need a separate button for “remove bookmarked lines” vs “cut”, because cutting will remove those. You don’t really need a separate button for “remove unmarked lines”, because you could just “inverse bookmarks” then “cut”.
edit: crossed out the “compromise” line; a second modal dialog might be worse than a fifth tab, and moving the bookmark action to be separate from the mark action makes more sense to me than a second dialog.
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@PeterJones said in Actions for bookmark in Mark box.:
certain recent statements by the developer that indicate feature-requests by random users, rather than by regular contributors, are given more weight.
Hmm. Yea, seems crazy, though.
Often a “random” user comes up with a “scattershot” idea, that is just the foundation of something good.
Refinement of an idea by a group of “regulars” and then submission as a real feature request by one of them – that seems to make a whole lot more sense. -
@PeterJones said in Actions for bookmark in Mark box.:
…having to go to the Find tab to highlight the matches and then switch to the Replace tab to do the replacement, but then have to go back to Find again to highlight the next match before going to Replace to change the text.
Point taken, but isn’t the example flawed?
Replace tab has Find Next functionality on its own, so no tab switching in this circumstance. -
@PeterJones said in Actions for bookmark in Mark box.:
Or, if you really want a fifth tab, then remove the “Bookmark lines”, and have the action of setting bookmarks be in the same tab as the buttons that act on the bookmarks
Perhaps a good idea.
I’ve not quite understood why the text-coloring and bookmark-setting operations are as “tied together” as they are. I suppose because they are both a sort of “marking”, but that’s kinda like “Auto-indent” and “Auto-complete” are on the same tab in the Preferences because they both start with “auto”. -
@PeterJones said in Actions for bookmark in Mark box.:
You don’t really need a separate button for “remove bookmarked lines” vs “cut”, because cutting will remove those.
My thought are that these should remain two separate actions, because cut is destructive to the clipboard, when you may not want that.
You don’t really need a separate button for “remove unmarked lines”, because you could just “inverse bookmarks” then
True enough, but maybe it doesn’t “hurt” to just leave it as separate functionality?
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On the topic of bookmarking functionality, what is the “community’s” thoughts on this FR I noticed: Feature Request: show bookmarks in search results?
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@Alan-Kilborn said in Actions for bookmark in Mark box.:
Probably not a lot of users use bookmarks (but who really knows); burdening the Mark window with more bookmark functionality than Bookmark line seems misplaced to me.
Hi @Alan-Kilborn
Why do you expect that a function is made but not used much ?
This bookmark function set is very useful for user who want to separate the the data.
I think putting Cut and Copy bookmarked lines buttons to the Mark box doesn’t make it a mess at all but make it a lot more handy. -
@Alan-Kilborn said in Actions for bookmark in Mark box.:
what is the “community’s” thoughts on this FR I noticed: Feature Request: show bookmarks in search results?
It looks nice. I find it more useful to search for bookmarks themselves vs seeing which lines in a search happened to be bookmarked. As always, I already have an NppExec script to find all bookmarked lines.
Although if you could bookmark in the search results and it would carry over to the document, that may be useful. Like I bookmark all the lines that have “text phrase” in them. then search for all lines that have “text phrase” in them and in the search results I see them all and notice one doesn’t have a bookmark - oops, I must have missed it, let me just add the bookmark in the search results and that line is automatically bookmarked in the document view as well. That’d be cool.
Cheers.
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@Dat-Tran-Tan said in Actions for bookmark in Mark box.:
Why do you expect that a function is made but not used much ?
It was just a guess, based upon how much “bookmarks” are (not) discussed on this forum, of course this is in comparison to what else is discussed, in terms of quantity.
There are probably plenty of functions in Notepad++ that got “made” but don’t see a lot of use; e.g. Document Peeker (uh, oh, now I will hear from all of the fans of that feature).
I think putting Cut and Copy bookmarked lines buttons to the Mark box doesn’t make it a mess at all but make it a lot more handy
Clearly. That’s what your original post was about.
But is it the best approach? That’s what’s being debated. -
@Michael-Vincent said in Actions for bookmark in Mark box.:
I find it more useful to search for bookmarks themselves vs seeing which lines in a search happened to be bookmarked
It appears you differ in opinion from the poster of the issue on github.
Perhaps you should also comment there to make your feelings known about it.if you could bookmark in the search results and it would carry over to the document, that may be useful
In theory, I think Yes.
However, in practice that may be difficult because the Find result window quickly becomes out of date when edits are made.
What happens when you intend to bookmark a line via the proposed method, and that line is not the same line in the original document? -
I am a fan of the Mark tab and use it frequently together with several of the Menu => Search => BookMark commands. I agree with the original poster that it would be good if the Bookmark commands were available from the Mark tab. Having to move the mouse pointer from the Mark tab to the menu bar and click through to the wanted Bookmark menu entry takes time and lots of mouse waving.
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@Alan-Kilborn said in Actions for bookmark in Mark box.:
Point taken, but isn’t the example flawed?
Replace tab has Find Next functionality on its own, so no tab switching in this circumstance.That was my point. Replace has Find Next button because it would be way too tedious to have to switch back and forth. In the same way, having the command that makes the bookmarks on tab 4, but having the commands that do something with the bookmarks on tab 5 would be equally tedious, and thus not recommended.
But you have already agreed that separating the setting-bookmark action out from the setting-marks might be a good idea, anyway. And I now think that’s a better solution than crowding tab 4.
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@PeterJones said in Actions for bookmark in Mark box.:
That was my point.
Ah, I see.
That opens the door to why Find and Replace are even separate tabs in the first place, being so similar.
I mean really, if room was made on Replace for 3 buttons, two tabs could go down to one Find or Replace :- Count
- Find All in Current Document
- Find All in All Opened Documents
Note that I’m not actually proposing this change, just mentally kicking it around (as something I’ve never thought about before).
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It seems the Notepad++ devs have arrived at a solution that is less complicated than some of those suggested here (especially my idea of a 5th tab).
See HERE and notice point #2 of the 7.8.7 change log:
2. Add right-click context menu to bookmark margin.
While not exactly what the OP wanted, it certainly makes the bookmark handling commands easier to get to than menuing to them.