On Fri, 25 Jan 2008 13:33:22 +0000, Nick Treleaven nick.treleaven@btinternet.com wrote:
On Wed, 23 Jan 2008 02:39:44 -0500 "John Gabriele" jmg3000@gmail.com wrote:
Last year I brought up the topic of Geany having an incremental search backward feature. Nick mentioned (http://lists.uvena.de/pipermail/geany/2007-September/001665.html) that it might eventually get implemented.
Since then, when using Geany, I've tried using Ctrl-F to move focus to the search bar (incremental search forward), Shift-Ctrl-g to go backward, and Ctrl-E to bring focus back to the editor. The problem though, is that it still feels quite clumsy to me. So, I've got 2 ideas for improvement:
- Since Geany is a GUI editor/IDE, and it's got a toolbar, how
about having a (possibly optionally visible) checkbox widget associated with the Search field, such that when checked, does the search in the opposite direction? That would seem to be an easy way to provide incremental search backward. If you think it looks like an ugly hack, you could always leave the checkbox's visibility off, by default, and then provide a sub-checkbox for "Prefs --> Toolbar tab --> Items section --> Show Search field" to make it visible. As long as users could toggle the checkbox (while visible) by hitting an Alt key combo (like other GUI parts), it would speed up editing a lot, IMO.
I'm not sure that a checkbox is a good idea. Maybe just a keybinding
I agree, I also don't like a checkbox in the toolbar. A possibility would be another search button next to the search field, dedicated for backward search. But an usual button would bloat it too much, IMO. I was also thinking(in the past, John I didn't forget this request :D) of two search buttons vertically separated. Hard to explain, something like:
---------------- Button backward | search field | --------------- ---------------- Button forward
Without having tried it, I assume it isn't possible to divide a toolbar item into a VBox and add two widgets in it. Additionally, I could image it doesn't look very nice, especially with small symbols.
Yet another idea: the current search button next to the search field in the toolbar gets overloaded: left-click does the usual forward search and when right-clicking the button, Geany does the requested backward search.
Regards, Enrico