[Github-comments] [geany] Find popup does not update with new highlighted text without closing and reopening it. (#758)

[Matthew Brush]

> This is not a bug, Geany operates as it is supposed to. Adding an additional behaviour is not fixing a bug.

Yeah, it's not a bug, but it's almost surely an "unfinished" (un-fleshed-out?) feature. I suspect nobody intentionally developed it and tried keeping the search string up to date and decided to remove it in favour of the current behaviour. More likely they got it working updating the search text the first time and never thought about the use case of searching again with dialog open, or maybe the search dialog was initially modal/one-shot and updating it again made no sense.

But anyway, my point was more generally that every time someone proposes an improvement, doesn't necessarily mean we need to add a preference to retain the old behaviour.

> that moves the cursor down

It selects the previously searched string from the combo box when you do a find (Ctrl+F), which, IIUC is where this improvement is wanted (at least it is for me).

> Clearly there is a disagreement about usage

I don't necessarily disagree about the find usage, I'm just trying to understand the use case where the proposed behaviour wouldn't be wanted, and if it wasn't wanted, and there is an actual use-case for only updating the search string the first time but no times after, what's wrong with just pressing the down arrow after Ctrl+F to use previous search string.

I don't have a lot of programs installed here, but out of curiosity I did a quick survey:

- Firefox updates the search string
- Unsurprisingly Thunderbird too
- QtCreator does too
- And Gedit
- KWrite
- Konsole
- Mousepad has an open bug report to implement it (it doesn't even update it the first time).
- Sublime Text has two different keybindings; one updates the search string one never does.
- Quassel (my IRC client) doesn't update it

In any case, I don't really care that much about adding a preference. My opinion would be to not have it in the Find dialog for the reasons mentioned by @dmap-guru.

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
https://github.com/geany/geany/issues/758#issuecomment-180153642
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