Re: Bug in internal viewer in mc 4.7.1

[Theodore Kilgore <kilgota banach math auburn edu>]

On Wed, 10 Mar 2010, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote:

> It would appear that on Mar 9, Theodore Kilgore did say:
>
> > On Sat, 6 Mar 2010, Reynir Stefansson wrote:
> > Indeed. For that matter, why would I want to continue a search after finding
> > one or more occurrences of the search string, and then have it automatically
> > loop back to the top of the file and find the first occurrence a second time?
> > I would find it more logical, understandable, and actually useful if search
> > would start at the top of the file, progress downward as the search for the
> > same string is repeated, and quit when it reaches the bottom of the file. It
> > appears to me from several recent uses that it is in fact looping around to
> > the top of the file, which is a bit strange.
>
> I Lets see if I understand you Theodore; At the moment I'm logged into my
> Elive distro which still has mc 4.6.2-pre1, so I can't check how much of
> this behavior has changed... In 4.6.2-pre1, doing a search from the
> internal file viewer always seems to start at the top of the document.
>
> Which is one of the reasons I usually use "less" instead of the internal
> viewer...
>
> But since it would only make sense for mc 4.7.1 to ask this at all if it now starts
> the search from something like the top of the current screenful of the displayed
> file??? And thus the complaint was merely that it doesn't notice when the said first
> displayed line was in fact also the very first line in the file, and that mc should
> in that case, remember not to ask? In which case it seems like a small thing to me...
>
> Or do you mean that even if you were half way through viewing a large file and noticed
> that some interesting phrase or word that appeared a gazillion times in the first
> half of the file hasn't been mentioned for several screen fulls And want to
> know if it occurs AGAIN.  You would find it more useful to HAVE to search from
> the top, and try to keep track of when you run out of matching expressions from
> parts of the file you've already looked at???

Yes, it is this one. The problem I noticed is that search automatically 
_wraps_ back to the top of the file and therefore recovers (again) the 
first item in the file which would come up with the particular search. 
While some might find that really clever, it is clearly not always so 
very, very clever. I suspect that everyone reading this can imagine 
circumstances in which one might not want that to happen. It might be 
greatly preferable to know that one has found the last occurrence of the 
searched item, and that there are no more to be found from that point on 
to the bottom of the file.

If the search functionality has to be "locked in" to just one of these, I 
would greatly prefer the second alternative, myself, and a window popping 
up with "String not found" or whatever, and then, if it is intensely 
desired by someone, "Repeat this search from the beginning of the file?" 
could be in that window, too, with an appropriate box to tick. One could 
even put under "Repeat this search from the beginning of the file?" 
another choice, saying, "Always do this?"

Theodore Kilgore