On 6/26/07, John Gabriele jmg3000@gmail.com wrote:
[snip]
C. The mortal sin: Incremental search. Geany's Achilles' heel. One of an editors' most-useful features, it should be be effortless to do forward and backward incremental searches. As implemented, if I want to incrementally search forward, I need to hit F7, tap F3 to get to the one I want, then F2 to get back to the editor. So, I've basically got to spend the entire search looking at my hands instead of the text. It's even worse to search backward incrementally -- not sure I can even do this. Here's my proposed solution. Buckle seatbelts, and please observe the no-smoking signs:
- Steal Ctrl-T. Use it for forward incremental search (think of it as "to" or "incremen*t*al"). Same as today's F7. Move "transpose lines" to Shift-Ctrl-L.
- Shift-Ctrl-T gets you find next (like F3).
- Use Alt-T to start a reverse incremental search (Use Alt-O to get the Tools menu).
- Shift-Alt-T gets you find previous. Nice consistency here, I think.
- Hitting Ctrl-LeftArrow or Ctrl-RightArrow should snap you out of the incremental search and back to the main editor window (instead of today's F2). After an incremental search, you often either want to go to the beginning or end of the word you found anyway.
When you're in an incremental search, regardless of direction, you should be able to tap either Shift-Ctrl-T to find next, or Shift-Alt-T to find previous.
Then on 7/4/07, I wrote:
Also, since now Ctrl-G would be freed up, even though I know you prefer F3 for "find again" (and Shift-F3 for "find previous"), it's pretty standard to use Ctrl-G and Shift-Ctrl-G for that (Mac OS X, KDE, and Gnome). MS Windows is the only one who uses F3 for it. And Ctrl-G really is easier to hit than an F_key without looking away from the keyboard. Shift-F3 is even harder to hit. :) {ducks}
Well, with Ctrl-G and Shift-Ctrl-G set up to do find next/previous, to get incremental search working nicely, I just:
* changed "switch to toolbar search field" from F7 to Ctrl-T (incremen*t*al search) * changed "back to editor window" from F2 to Shift-Ctrl-T
and it seems to work quite nicely for me now. Thanks.
---John