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Feedback on Find / Replace

Jonathan Marshall 12 years ago updated by Mikel Ward 12 years ago 1

Some (probably minor) gripes about find and replace in ST2, and not in any particular order. I think this is the area where I feel the most frustration with ST2 on a daily basis.


For those of us lucky enough to have 27" monitors, having the find & replace text & options on the far left hand side and the buttons on the far right hand side results in a lot of mouse and eyeball travel to operate the dialog box. This is especially true if you are editing a buffer on the far left of a multi-column layout in full screen mode. I think it would be better if the dialog box was kept smaller & closer to the action - perhaps even just at the bottom of the current column only? (it's 60cm wide at the moment!) 


There's no default keyboard shortcut for the Replace button in Find/Replace (or at least none is shown in the tooltip).  


When you press Find in Find/Replace the found text is highlighted with a bright yellow background. If you replace the text, the cursor moves to the next find but the background is not highlighted (but it comes back on the following find)  


Similarly if you find next when the find dialog box is open you get a yellow background. But if you dismiss the dialog box and find next, no yellow background. I guess I have a lot of problems locating the cursor in ST2 so I normally use 'line highlight' to help. The removal of the line highlight during find plus jumping the cursor and then not sufficiently highlighting the new cursor location makes it hard.


An undo last replace option would be nice (without dismissing the find/replace dialog box or switching focus back to the file).


If I have text like this in a file

    (foo.helloworld)

    (foo.helloworld)


and I find '.helloworld' with whole word matching on, then ST2 finds the text. However if I try to replace with '.monkey' when I click replace nothing happens. If I only have one (foo.helloworld) in the file it works fine.


Lastly some changes that I think have already been suggested in the forum: 1) Find and Replace across open files and/or projects. 2) the option to have find in files results to look like the output from ack, with keyboard shortcuts to find prev / next.


Tooltip now says
Replace = Ctrl+Shift+H
Replace All = Ctrl+Shift+Enter

Can I suggest putting each separate suggestion into a separate topic?  It will make it easier to find, vote on, and notify when it's done.