Find & Replace & Mark re-organization proposal

shodanx2

Hello here is my proposal for an improved Find & replace dialog

Most of this is self-explanatory
If you think about it you can probably figure out what everything means but here is my explanation

This icon section means as follows

Top row is search mode, this is “radio style” button only one can be enabled at once.
The modes are like current, but with one addition.

Literal search (normal mode)
Escaped Literal search (extended mode)
Regex Search (regex search)
Semantic search (no current equivalent, what would be a 250MB offline/local llm direct search module)

the rest are all toggle switches

Case sensitive search
Diacritic sensitive search (that is accents and special characters, example whether e matches é è ê ë and so on)
dot includes newline (this toggle only means something in regex mode)
fuzzy logic search ( this allows for instance “boat~” to find stuff like bat, boar, bost, oat, coat, goat, bots, boats, boating and combined with semantic search, it allows synonym search such as canoe, ship, ferry, yacht, vessel and off course, scooner )

wrap around
word search (match whole word only)
boolean search
and settings

Next we have the search and replace operators

These are fully spelled out, and because we have separate buttons for “in document” and “in selection” we never have to care about checking “In Selection” ever again, that setting is simply made redundant !! Yay, my biggest pet peeve and worry and the impetus for making this proposal !

And this last line of controls, represents the Mark operation, which I never remember exist when i need them and I won’t go to another tab to use (instead I just double click the word and that’s all I use the mark function, but this would be useful if it were more ergonomic to use)

So here is what the symbols mean

Highlight previous
Highlight ALL
Highlight next

bookmark previous
bookmark ALL
bookmark next

Copy highlights
Copy bookmarks
Delete bookmarks
Delete highlights
Delete ALL

(I have reached limit of images here, I will continue message as a reply once this post is out of the moderation queue)

David Brigden52

@shodanx2

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?

PeterJones

@David-Brigden52 ,

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)