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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: Width of find/replace dialog in KWrite/Kate
From:       Jakob Petsovits <jpetso () gmx ! at>
Date:       2008-05-28 21:40:56
Message-ID: 200805282340.56751.jpetso () gmx ! at
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On Wednesday, 28. May 2008, Michael Rudolph wrote:
> Regarding "match case" I'd just search case insensitive, unless there is
> a capital letter in the search string. For more complex searches there
> is regular expression support anyway.

That quote would lead me to the assumption that you never used Kate
for writing (and replacing) code - case insensitive must be an option,
either of those two possibilities is indispensible.

> I don't know what the problems with highlighting all matches are, but I
> would try to sort those out, instead of telling the user: we couldn't
> figure it out, decide for yourself what kind of highlighting you want.

Yeah, but I can very well see how "highlight all matches" can be useful in
some cases while being annoying in others (hi Eclipse with your painful 
non-configurable always-highlighter!), so probably it's not the worst idea to 
make it an option.

> The "Selection only" option also only makes sense in a limited number of
> cases, in my point of view. When nothing is selected, you search the
> whole document. When only a word or a small number of letters is
> selected, you also search the whole document. Searching only within the
> selection only makes sense to me, when the selection is large enough,
> that the user might need technical help to find some string inside it.
> I'd assume something like "more than two lines or more than 100
> characters".

And you know what, that's exactly what Kate does - selecting
"Selection only" when multiple lines were selected on pressing Ctrl-R.

Works great, however I'm not sure how usable this is if the user had selected 
multiple lines and still wants to replace words in the whole document - there 
would be neither an indication nor an option why stuff works this or that 
way. I think it's way more usable to have an option than to ask users to 
deselect their selection in order to replace all over the document.

Don't know about the "start from cursor" options, I also like to start my 
searches just from the cursor position... but then, that's just what I do, 
and might not be representative for other people, just as your removal of 
options works for yourself but not for myself. We'd need a better sample for 
reasonable statistical significance.

Given that this is the "power search and replace" bar, I think it's reasonable 
to give access to a range of options that are more or less widely used.

Wishes,
  Jakob
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