Sublime Forum

The Find function confuses me

#1

What do I love about Sublime? The graphic overview and the text formatting.

What do I hate? The funny way that FIND seems to work.

I hit Ctrl-F, type in a search term and hit Enter. I’m expecting to do a Find Forward from the location of my cursor, but I oft seem to end up in a "find all’ situation and I don’t know if I’ve scrolled up or down. It might be me, but I haven’t quite grokked that behaviour.

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#2

I understand you; I use all these different kinds of find, depending on need, and I’d like key presses for all of them;

Direction: find everything, find the next occurrence, find the previous occurrence.
Engine: find using regular expressions, find literal strings.
Location: find in current document, find in all documents, find in selection
Interactive: Yes or no. Does typing into the search box automatically highlight the next instance? (ctrl+f in firefix, ctrl+s in emacs)

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#3

The best way to find forward from the current cursor position is to use Ctrl+I for incremental search.

The default find all behaviour of the std Ctrl+F find is unintuitive, but it avoids replicating the functionality that Ctrl+I provides. In hindsight, it’s probably the wrong default.

The find panel is due for a revamp: I want to integrate incremental search into the same panel, allow regex incremental searches to work properly, and make it all work nicely with key bindings. There are some other things to get done beforehand though.

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#4

For some reason, I didn’t notice those keyboard shortcuts! These give me all the basics.

I suppose I’d expected the buttons on that panel to have tooltips – as you hover over ‘find next’, a tooltip with ‘F3’ appears. Any form discovery, really.

Any way to turn on/off regex during find?

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#5

There’s no way to toggle regex on/off with the keyboard yet, but there will be when the find panel gets a revamp

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