Search++: A work in progress

Coises

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

Regarding the two behaviors of the Replace command :

First, I suppose that a special mark/sign/icon in the Search++ title zone, to clearly identify the current behavior of the Replace action, would be welcome !

It is indicated by the icon on the Replace button. Is there some reason that isn’t enough?

Now, do we need the additional sub-menu in order to occasionally use the opposite Replace behavior, without changing the default settings, as you expressed ?

I agree that the “opposite jump behavior” sub-menu isn’t strictly necessary, but I don’t think it does any harm, either. To my mind, the commands on that menu are still commands that “belong to” the Replace button. If anything, it’s the Jump to next match after Replace option on the Tools menu that strikes me as logically redundant; but I wanted something to which I could assign that Ctrl+J shortcut for easy switching.

If user experience indicates that the sub-menu creates more confusion than convenience, I’ll remove it.

guy038

Hello, @coises,

When I said :

First, I suppose that a special mark/sign/icon in the Search++ title zone, to clearly identify the current behavior of the Replace action, would be welcome !

You answered me :

It is indicated by the icon on the Replace button . Is there some reason that isn’t enough?

 🡪   replace then jump to a new match forward
 🡨   replace then jump to a new match backward
 🡪❚  replace and highlight replacement; next click finds a new match forward
 ❚🡨  replace and highlight replacement; next click finds a new match backward

You’re certainly younger than me and/or have very good eyes ! I did notice that symbol at right of the Replace button but, it seems a bit tiny !

Best Regards,

guy038

P.S. :

Perhaps it would be a good idea to specify, in the manual, that :

All sections concerning regular expressions and formulas work correctly when the regex button is selected !
When the ICU button is selected, you could also point out that the important features, below, are NOT supported :
- The \K construction
- All the Backtracking Control verbs, like (*SKIP) or (*F)
- All the symbolic names, except for [[:ascii.]]
- The invalid UTF-8 characters, like [[.x80.]] or [[.xff.]]
- The \l and \u syntaxes as shorthand of [[:lowercase letter:]] and [[:uppercase letter:]] ( which are the [[:upper:]] and [[:lower:]] equivalents when the Regex button is selected ! )

Coises

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

When I said :

First, I suppose that a special mark/sign/icon in the Search++ title zone, to clearly identify the current behavior of the Replace action, would be welcome !

You answered me :

It is indicated by the icon on the Replace button . Is there some reason that isn’t enough?
 🡪   replace then jump to a new match forward
 🡨   replace then jump to a new match backward
 🡪❚  replace and highlight replacement; next click finds a new match forward
 ❚🡨  replace and highlight replacement; next click finds a new match backward
You’re certainly younger than me and/or have very good eyes ! I did notice that symbol at right of the Replace button but, it seems a bit tiny !

Thank you for the observation. I consider those symbols important in general (not just for this specific case) because they remind you if you’ve click-selected one of the alternatives from the drop-down menus. Before Search++ can be considered ready for a first “stable” release, I have to make sure they are clearly legible. (I used symbols instead of words because the buttons would have to be much bigger to show the full command names as used in the drop-down menus, and that in turn would make the minimum useful size of the dialog much bigger.)

I’m 68 — I don’t know if that’s younger than you. It’s surely not that my eyes are that good. One of the main things I wanted to accomplish in Search++ was using Scintilla controls for the find and replace text, partly because I’m so tired of struggling to read what I’ve typed into those boxes in Notepad++ and Columns++ searches. (The other main reason was to avoid the complications that arise with line endings and “invisible” characters in the standard Windows controls.)

So I think it’s either that I can see the difference in the two symbols because I know what I’m looking for — after all, I don’t have any trouble with the buttons and check boxes in standard search dialogs, and their font is the same as the one in the find and replace boxes — or they aren’t displaying the same on all systems. (Or both.)

For development purposes, to keep things simple, I’ve used Unicode characters for the symbols on the buttons. That has somewhat limited my choice of symbols, as well as given me no control over the size and weight (aside from finding a different symbol). It could also be the case that they display differently on different systems. Which all means that using Unicode symbol characters is a bad way to do this. At some point I will need to replace them using a different method that will be more complex, but will give me more control.

Are you using a high-dpi monitor, by any chance? At present I do not have one available for testing. I have read various information from Microsoft about it, but information without actual practice tends to turn into gibberish… at this point I don’t think I can adequately predict how this will look on high dpi.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to specify, in the manual, that :

All sections concerning regular expressions and formulas work correctly when the regex button is selected !

When the ICU button is selected, you could also point out that the important features, below, are NOT supported :

The \K construction

All the Backtracking Control verbs, like (*SKIP) or (*F)

All the symbolic names, except for [[:ascii.]]

The invalid UTF-8 characters, like [[.x80.]] or [[.xff.]]

Indeed, my documentation says very little about the ICU search at present. At some point before a first “stable” release I will either document the ICU search more thoroughly or “hide” it so users won’t stumble on it and be confused by it.

The \l and \u syntaxes as shorthand of [[:lowercase letter:]] and [[:uppercase letter:]] ( which are the [[:upper:]] and [[:lower:]] equivalents when the Regex button is selected ! )

A minor note: this is a point in which Search++ Regex differs from Columns++ as a result of changes I made to use ICU as the source of information for Unicode properties instead of the mechanism I cobbled together in Columns++.

In Columns++, \l and [[:lower:]] are equivalent to [[:lowercase letter:]] (or [[:Ll:]], or \p{Ll}) — 2,283 matches in your Total_Chars.txt file.

In Search++ Regex, \l and [[:lower:]] are equivalent to (?-i)[[:lower:]] in ICU — 2,595 matches in Total_Chars.txt.

You can still use [[:lowercase letter:]] (or [[:Ll:]], or \p{Ll}) in Search++ Regex to match the same 2,283 characters as (?-i)[[:lowercase letter:]] in ICU.

Unlike ICU, both Columns++ and Search++ Regex ignore case insensitivity when matching named character classes (including the \l and \u shorthands).

guy038

Hi, @coises,

Well, I’m 74. Now, with my glasses I have nearly 20/20 vision in my left eye but only 3/10 in my right eye, due to a vascular problem in the retina that I had about 10 years ago :-((

No, I don’t have an high-dpi monitor and here is a snapshot of the Replace button, in exact size :

f556a661-b28b-4549-9781-c74cd0f30fc2-Capture d'écran 2026-04-12 202415.png

Of course, if I look at the button, I’m able to notice the mark →❙, after the word Replace, but I may miss it sometimes !

Thank you, to point out the specificities and differences about the character classes regarding Columns ++ and Search ++,

So, here is a summary on this topic :

•==============================•=============•================•=========================================================================•
|               Regex          |  Columns++  | Search++ Regex |                              Search++ ICU                               |
•==============================•=============•================•==============•==========================================================•
|  (?-i)\l                     |    2,283    |      2,595     |         1    |  Letter l                                                |
|  (?-i)[[:lower:]]            |    2,283    |      2,595     |     2,595    |  = (?-i)\p{Ll} + (?-i)\p{Other Lowercase} = 2,283 + 312  |
|                              |             |                |              |                                                          |
|  (?-i)\p{Ll}                 |    2,283    |      2,283     |     2,283    |                                                          |
|  (?-i)[[:lowercase letter:]] |    2,283    |      2,283     |     2,283    |                                                          |
|  (?-i)[[:Ll:]]               |    2,283    |      2,283     |     2,283    |                                                          |
•------------------------------•-------------•----------------•--------------•----------------------------------------------------------•
|  (?-i)\u                     |    1,886    |      2,006     |    Invalid   |  ???                                                     |
|  (?-i)[[:upper:]]            |    1,886    |      2,006     |     2,006    |  = (?-i)\p{Lu} + (?-i)\p{Other Uppercase} = 1,886 + 120  |
|                              |             |                |              |                                                          |
|  (?-i)\p{Lu}                 |    1,886    |      1,886     |     1,886    |                                                          |
|  (?-i)[[:Uppercase letter:]] |    1,886    |      1,886     |     1,886    |                                                          |
|  (?-i)[[:Lu:]]               |    1,886    |      1,886     |     1,886    |                                                          |
•==============================•=============•================•==============•==========================================================•
|  (?i)\l                      |    2,283    |      2,595     |         2    |  Letters L and l                                         |
|  (?i)[[:lower:]]             |    2,283    |      2,595     |     4,082    |                                                          |
|                              |             |                |              |                                                          |
|  (?i)\p{Ll}                  |    2,283    |      2,283     |     3,729    |                                                          |
|  (?i)[[:lowercase letter:]]  |    2,283    |      2,283     |     3,729    |                                                          |
|  (?i)[[:Ll:]]                |    2,283    |      2,283     |     3,729    |                                                          |
•------------------------------•-------------•----------------•--------------•----------------------------------------------------------•
|  (?i)\u                      |    1,886    |      2,006     |    Invalid   |  ???                                                     |
|  (?i)[[:upper:]]             |    1,886    |      2,006     |     3,484    |                                                          |
|                              |             |                |              |                                                          |
|  (?i)\p{Lu}                  |    1,886    |      1,886     |     3,322    |                                                          |
|  (?i)[[:Uppercase letter:]]  |    1,886    |      1,886     |     3,322    |                                                          |
|  (?i)[[:Lu:]]                |    1,886    |      1,886     |     3,322    |                                                          |
•==============================•=============•================•==============•==========================================================•

Note that all the properties, below, are used internally by the Unicode Cconsortium for generating other properties and are not intended to be used stand-alone. These properties only contribute to real properties so there’s no direct support for these properties in ICU and they all return the Invalid regular expression message !

\p{Jamo_Short_Name}                      \p{JSN}
\p{Other Alphabetic}                      \p{OAlpha} 
\p{Other Default Ignorable Code Point}    \p{ODI}    
\p{Other Grapheme Extend}                 \p{OGr Ext}
\p{Other ID Continue}                     \p{OIDC}   
\p{Other ID Start}                        \p{OIDS}   
\p{Other Lowercase}                       \p{OLower} 
\p{Other Math}                            \p{OMath}  
\p{Other Uppercase}                       \p{OUpper}

You can verify the number of characters, in these categories, from the files https://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/ucd/PropList.txt and https://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/ucd/Jamo.txt

Best regards

guy038

Coises

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

No, I don’t have an high-dpi monitor and here is a snapshot of the Replace button, in exact size :

The proportion is a bit different on my system:

so it seems the display does differ from system to system. I will find a way to make those icons more recognizable and obvious… I just don’t know when.

Lachlanmax

@Coises
It works great for me in this version.

I especially like the Remove Marks option and how well it works together with the bookmarks. That combination feels very natural in the workflow now.

For the moment I would not suggest any changes, it already feels quite solid for how I use it.
Thanks for the good work you did for my requests!

guy038

Hello, @coises and All,

I almost finished to study all the ICU syntax mainly focused on Unicode properties and, so far, all the results seem coherent ;-))

However, I noticed something strange about the property Numeric_Value

To this purpose, refer to https://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/ucd/extracted/DerivedNumericValues.txt

For any number which has a finite number of decimal places, like 0.1875 or 0.4, located after the equal sign, in the \p{Numeric_Value=....} syntax, the returned result is always correct. For example, \p{Numeric_Value=0.25} or \p{nv=0.25} returns 14 matches, as you may verify in the Unicode file

However, for any number which has an infinite number of decimal places, like 0.333333333333 or 0.142857142857, located after the equal sign, in the \p{Numeric_Value=....} syntax, the returned result is always 0 instead of an integer > 0

In addition, the special value \p{Numeric_Value=NaN} should return 323,567, against my Total_chars.txt file, instead of the value 0 !

Is there any chance that you truncated the decimal part in Search ++ or something like that ?

Best Regards,

guy038

Coises

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

Is there any chance that you truncated the decimal part in Search ++ or something like that ?

No. I did not mess with the ICU search at all; the string entered in the Find box is exactly what ICU’s regular expression engine gets.

I see that \p{nv=0.3333333333333333} (or any greater number of 3s) returns six matches. Likewise, \p{nv=0.66666666666666667} returns seven matches, but fewer 6s returns none.

Since the ICU4C function u_getNumericValue(UChar32 c) returns a double, I would guess that matching is dependent on the precise quirks of double-precision floating point format.

In addition, the special value \p{Numeric_Value=NaN} should return 323,567, against my Total_chars.txt file, instead of the value 0 !

There might not be anything you can enter that will be translated as Not-a-Number. I note that \p{Numeric_Type=None} does return 323,567 matches.

guy038

Hello, @coises and All,

Ah… OK. Thank you very much for your insight ! So, it seems that :

When all digits, after the decimal dot, are identical, you need to put, at least, 16 digits
When digits, after the decimal dot, may be different, you need to put, at least, 17 digits

Thus, this list of all these rational numbers :

    1/12     \p{Numeric_Value=0.08333333333333333}    or    \p{nv=0.08333333333333333}    =     1
    1/9      \p{Numeric_Value=0.1111111111111111}     or    \p{nv=0.1111111111111111}     =     1
    1/7      \p{Numeric_Value=0.14285714285714285}    or    \p{nv=0.14285714285714285}    =     1
    1/6      \p{Numeric_Value=0.16666666666666666}    or    \p{nv=0.16666666666666666}    =     4
    1/3      \p{Numeric_Value=0.3333333333333333}     or    \p{nv=0.3333333333333333}     =     6
    5/12     \p{Numeric_Value=0.41666666666666666}    or    \p{nv=0.41666666666666666}    =     1
    7/12     \p{Numeric_Value=0.58333333333333333}    or    \p{nv=0.58333333333333333}    =     1
    2/3      \p{Numeric_Value=0.6666666666666666}     or    \p{nv=0.6666666666666666}     =     7
    5/6      \p{Numeric_Value=0.83333333333333333}    or    \p{nv=0.83333333333333333}    =     3
    11/12    \p{Numeric_Value=0.91666666666666666}    or    \p{nv=0.91666666666666666}    =     1

Now, I didn’t even notice that the \p{Numeric_Type=None} does give that expected number, which added to all the other values, returns the total amount of characters of the Total_Chars.txt file which is 325 590 !

BR

guy038

Coises

Search++ version 0.5.4 is available:

Fix bookmarks and Show command not working with ICU search engine.
Fix unwanted control character inserted when focus is in the Find or Replace box and a keyboard shortcut is used to activate a Tools menu command that opens a dialog.
Use a custom font for button symbols. (Those are the symbols that change when you shift+click one of the drop-down menus to change the button click command, to remind you at a glance what the current command extent and scope are.) Hopefully these are easier to read on different systems. Feedback is encouraged if the button symbols are hard to read or do not look right. This is a first attempt. Changes will probably follow in subsequent releases.

@guy038:

This should fix bookmarks (and also the Show command) not working with ICU, and the unexpected insertion of control characters when using Ctrl+Shift+E and Ctrl+Shift+Y.

The big change here (what took me so long) is using a custom font for the symbols on the buttons. How to make that work was… not obvious. Let me know if they are easier to read—and if they are enough easier to read. There is a tough space constraint on those buttons, but I really want to avoid making them any larger if at all possible. This was my first time trying to make a font of any sort. I’m sure the designs of those symbols can be refined a bit (or a lot).

guy038

Hello, @coises, @Lachlanmax and All,

Waoou ! This new 0.54 version of Search++ is almost perfect ! I do hope that @Lachlanmax will have the same feeling than me, regarding the Dark Mode displaying, that I don’t use personally !

The Bookmarks and Show commands, in ICU mode, work correctly.
The possible insertion of control chars, within the Find and Replace has gone away !
The symbols, written on the different buttons, are much more intuitive and easily allow us to control what we’re doing. I particularly like the Open Documents scope and Documents in this view scope symbols !
As implemented in the previous version, when focus is on Search++, a Ctrl + J action toggles from Jump to next match to Do not jump to next match. But now, it’s really more obvious to get the difference between the two symbols when looking at right of the Replace button !

One remark :

For the Selection scope, the symbol does not really look like a true letter S, unlike the Marked Text scope, which clearly displays the symbol M !

Refer the snapshot, below, with the Whole document scope on left of Find button, the Selection symbol on left of the Count button and the Marked Text symbol on left of the Find all button :

d69cc2ad-57d1-4653-b810-e800fdda577a-Capture d'écran 2026-04-18 115133.png

The Selection scope seems less easy to identify , at first sight, isn’t it ?

Now, a very simple bug to fix :

When the ICU is selected, if you try to do a simple Replace operation, Search++ displays the expected message Command not implemented and, of course, no replacement occurs.

Oddly, if you click on the Replace All button, the plugin displays the message Replaced xx matches in ... where xx represents the number of matches detected in current document ! But, luckily, no global replacement is performed, as well. I suppose that the identical message Command not implemented should be triggered, isn’t it ?

BTW, if the replacement process was allowed, in ICU mode, it seems that it would allow more than 9 back-references but would not accept any conditional replacement !

I also noted that the recursion feature is not allowed with the ICU regex engine !

Best Regards

guy038

P.S. :

I tried to double-click on the font file Search++-Private-Symbols.otf and I was able to recognize all the symbols used by your plugin !
In this version, in addition to the Search++-Private-Symbols.otf file, you also added a Search++.pdb file, which is quite large, indeed ! What is it used for ?