I am currently testing geany a lot, which explains the various issues created.

Anyway, this time I have a bug report; or, rather than a bug per se, perhaps a strange behaviour feature instead.

I will try to explain what I did:

- I was trying to search for a specific word/substring in a somewhat large file (~10.000 lines or so).

- I was clicking on the expander in that search widget, for "Find All" too.

- There, I was clicking on "In Document". (If you want to see it, just click on the part that expands that widget downwards.)

Next result was that suddenly the bottom pane flapped upwards and occupied like 60% of the space. With bottom pane I mean the notebook-like thing that has the entries such as "Status", "Compiler", "Messages", "Scribble", "Tasks".

The content in that first tab (Status) showed:

No matches found for "abhn".

(That was the sub-word I was trying to find.)

Alternatively it will show the result of the match when it found something, which is useful.

Anyway, the bottom pane unfortunately does not have a simple way for me to move it downwards, so 60% is now occupied with this status/compiler/messages/scribble/tasks widget and I can not resize it.

I restarted geany, and that bottom pane did not show up, so I assume that it can only be triggered (or at the least one way to trigger) through that search-functionality.

I am not against the functionality as such, but here are two things or three that I think are not ideal; or could be changed.

1) First, it would be great if we could resize that widget. I was trying to find an up-and-down arrow appearing but I could not find one. No clue why. Perhaps my gtk-version is broken, but either way an up-and-down arrow to resize this would help.

2) Second, and perhaps more importantly ... I did not have any bottom bane widget at all (actually I was even trying to find vte yesterday, but I guess I don't have vte installed or geany can not find it, so I was confused when a bottom pane suddenly showed up altogether).

To me this is by far the most surprising part. Consider that I am working mostly full screen in a text file. Now I am trying to search something and I have this cute small search widget. Then I hit "Document" and BAM, suddenly this strange bottom pane flaps open to like 60% ... this was unexpected to me. I don't really dislike it (only that I can not resize it) but it is unexpected and perhaps not intuitive. First, I would like to suggest to perhaps make it a bit smaller, right now it really occupies about the bottom 60%; may be better to occupy only 40% or less by default. But more importantly, I actually don't think this should appear at all. IMO it may be better if the search widget itself could show or indicate whether something has been found or not. (I have not looked at the code but I assume that it shows up in "Status" may be indicative that it is somehow registered there first, and then geany or gtk may assume that the user wants to see this; which is an ok assumption per se, but it does not make a whole lot of sense to me when we were already using only the search-widget).

3) This one probably requires more changes; the whole search widget interface redesigning. But I don't want to suggest any big work either. I only find the search widget/interface a bit confusing. Perhaps this could be a separate issue, like asking several users of geany how they use it, what they don't use, what they use a lot, and then eventually make some changes in the future. The options are fine, in principle, but the defaults seem a bit strange. For example, right now when I want to continue to search, I have to select the "Find" button; the "Cancel" button is the default focus, so when I hit enter, rather than searching again, that sub-widget is closed. That confuses me too; was different in my old editor. I can see people want to prefer cancel, but it may be better to be able to allow users to tweak it. Or to actually make an "In Document" search also part of the top-options, rather the expanded ones, without showing up the status at all. I usually need to search the whole document so the search interface is a bit sub-optimal for me right now.