Re: [Usability] How should an editor behave when it comes to search and replace?

[Paolo Borelli <pborelli katamail com>]

Il giorno lun, 03-01-2005 alle 15:42 +0100, Markus Bertheau ha scritto:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm writing a continuous-save, mom-friendly and plugin free text editor
> for GNOME.

Hi Markus, while I understand your desire to write your own project I
want to point out the we would welcome new contributors to gedit (the
text editor included in GNOME).

Being "Mom-friendly" is definately one of the goals of gedit and
autosaving is already implemented.

gedit has a plugin system, but I don't see how that is a problem (since
most of the plugins are off by default and normal user can ignore them)

>  I'd need interaction design advice on how a text editor
> should behave when it comes to searching / searching and replacing. What
> do you see as optimal behaviour for a text editor for GNOME in this
> respect?
> 

gedit currently implements the "usual" find dialog, the one with an
entry for the text to search and some toggles to tweak if you want to
match case etc. Among other things it behaves in the following way:
- when search is invoked and a word is already seleceted searching
defaults to that word
- the last searched text is remembered
- matches are highlighted and the textview is scrolled to the matching
text

While pretty standard, this search interface is not perfect, for
instance one of the problems is that the dialog may hide the matching
text.

Here are some bugzilla bugs that may be worth reading:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=115070
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=128554
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=153641

In particular the last one describes an alternative Search UI that we
are experimenting with.


ciao
	paolo