@shodanx2 said:

8. Provide live counts for search, that update as you type, eliminating the need for the Count button entirely as well as providing prev/all/next counts

Yikes! You apparently don’t use large files and/or exceedingly complex regular expressions. Even I have very-rarely needed to run searches that take minutes to run (and some unfortunate users must do that much more frequently than I do). The search engine can only run one search at a time, so every time I updated the regex, it would have to wait minutes to update the “live” count(s) before I could run the replacement I wanted. No thank you.

I could not complete it due to hitting the image posting limit.

And now the edit window as passed

So I have to finish the original message as a reply

and last is a toggle switch

This means “copy whole line” I should add the “copy” symbol as well.
What this does when active, is when you click Copy Highlights, instead of copying only the exact highlight, which is just your find string with various case, it will copy the whole lines which contain highlights, which I think is more useful.
That one might not even be a toggle. I thought it would be a toggle because it could affect bookmark as well, but actually, “copy bookmarks” already copies the entire bookmarked lines. So probably this should just be a separate action

“copy entire lines that include highlights”

Ah and the setting button, would serve to hide the important settings that we don’t need to interact on a day-to-day basis, but easier to get there than going to preference->whatever->etc…

And of course, once we have a single layout like this, it’s easy to put a layout toggle in the settings menu

Example hiding the Mark/Bookmark section

Also, didn’t have the time to include it and I have no more credits to make images but I would add a button to change the colours of “highlight/marks” so you can have multiple sets of highlighted terms with different colours. (Also I would make these sets independantly copiable/deletable from a list somewhere else)

hiding replace all in all documents

Hide replace functions

Here are lightmode versions of the reduced versions

Reduced (minus replace all in all document, minus Mark function )

Find only variant

And here are the suggested layout switches, in the setting/gear icon popup dialog

And of course, you tell the user what each button does via the use of button tooltip text

I would also put clickable yellow (?) buttons that you can click to open information page about the use of this dialog

Hi,

To answer

“What are the limitations in the existing Find … dialog that this improves or fixes?”

The benefits are

1. elimination of the “in selection” toggle which is extremely irritating and the impetus for creating this. Having to keep track of this at all times when using the replace function has always been a sore point, and it took me a really long time to realize that it was toggling itself based on selection length! With this, it is just GONE !

2. no longer having separate Find/Replace/Mark. Now each of those functions are immediately available (in particular the much more obscure mark function, but mostly it just eliminates the constant tab-switching between find and replace)

If I did not believe that this is entirely a waste of time, I would have probably integrated the other, also very similar functions into it.

3. Makes the input copy/swap function a single click operation
   

4. Provides just more of the dialog window width in use for the textbox
   

5. Eliminates transparency settings from main interface (it was just clutter)
   

6. Eliminates “split find next” checkbox toggle, which only exist to quiet opposition to change which has long ceased to exist (it is a vestigial feature, ~everyone~ uses a split find prev/next except the people who haven’t realized what the checkbox is for and therefore simply can’t find previous)
   

7. I think my system is ultimately a smaller learning curve than the original
   

8. Provide live counts for search, that update as you type, eliminating the need for the Count button entirely as well as providing prev/all/next counts
   

9. Suggests future features, semantic search, fuzzy logic search and boolean search which are common components of serious knowledge management systems.

10. Protects (and clearly advertises that it cannot be accidentally activated) against accidental triggering of “replace all in all documents”, which is of course devastating if triggered by accident

11. Proposes a more granular version of the mark system, I forgot to add “highlight colour” and “show highligth list” but that was already a lot
    

12. Makes search setting immediately accessible from the Find/Replace/mark dialog
    

13. Suggests diacritic sensitivity, in addition of the current case sensitivity and “whole word” search parameters
    

I think that is all.

And to answer
“What would this look light in light mode?”

It burns my retina with its intolerable brightness !

it’s a followon to issue #16229 by the same user, who suggested some changes last year, it was rejected, there was more conversation, then that user disappeared from that conversation for over a year before answering the last question posed of them in that discussion. This icon-based dialog was posted in that reply, then a few hours later, duplicated as a follow on issue #6010, an even older rejected proposal by a different username (which had eventually gone on to propose a huge monstrosity of a dialog, which would be unusable by any human, except maybe the one who proposed it).

This icon-based proposal has the benefit over the monstrosity in that it’s not as much a “wall of text” proposal. But looking at this icon-based proposal, I don’t see what the benefit is over the current find/replace dialog. Given that all the other dialogs in the app are text based, I think that an icon-based dialog for search/replace would tend to confuse rather than help users (but that’s just my opinion)

I have two questions:

What would this look light in light mode?

What are the limitations in the existing Find … dialog that this improves or fixes?