Compact Find dialogue box or bar possible
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@alan-kilborn said in Compact Find dialogue box or bar possible:
Any time you do a “Find Next” (for ex.) type caret movement, the caret is moved, period.
My suggestion maintains that behaviour: when dismissing the dialog with the Cancel button (or the “incremental” bar with ‘x’), the caret retains its position as per most recent Find op, exactly as now.
My suggestion is that after doing a bunch of searching, you can also choose a wonderful new kind of dialog dismissal which restores caret position that was recorded when dialog launched.
A lot of “what coders do all day” is:
- think about using a thing “over here”
- find the thing “over there (and there)”, and (re)learn stuff about it
- make changes “over here”
This is ubiquitous, and restoring the caret to where you are “really” working/editing is an annoyance if it’s not nearby, and if no advance action (like bookmarking) was taken to automate the return.
So the benefit of this is very similar to the benefit of calling functions in code, or “Return from interrupt” on a microprocessor: it automates resumption after completion of a subordinate task.
And tools should support coders, work with their behavior patterns, and delight them by anticipating and minimizing the micro-jabs of frustration that contribute to fatigue and an experience of drudgery.
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@neil-schipper said in Compact Find dialogue box or bar possible:
So the benefit of this is very similar to the benefit of calling functions in code, or “Return from interrupt” on a microprocessor: it automates resumption after completion of a subordinate task.
In this instance, Neil, I think this is a bad analogy. In the procedural programming paradigm, when the program execution comes to a function, it jumps to the function until completed, but when returned, it jumps to the next instruction after the function calling point, so this example isn’t really applicable to this point of view. :)
That said, I guess this would be a useful feature to someone, but I look at it like, if I need to know where I started, that’s why there’s line numbers. I usually know at what point I started the search and know where I need to go back to, so this isn’t something I’d care about, but I can see where someone might like this kind of functionality.