From kde-usability  Sat May 31 00:16:56 2008
From: Andy Goossens <andygoossens () telenet ! be>
Date: Sat, 31 May 2008 00:16:56 +0000
To: kde-usability
Subject: Re: Width of find/replace dialog in KWrite/Kate
Message-Id: <200805310216.57283.andygoossens () telenet ! be>
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-usability&m=121219310211949

On vrijdag 30 mei 2008, Chusslove Illich wrote:
>   http://caslav.gmxhome.de/image/kde4-searchbarpower-05.png

For my personal taste, the searchbar and replacebar are too complex. That is 
also the reason why we now struggling to position all their widgets.

I took a look at 3 programs (Firefox, gedit and IntelliJ IDEA [1]) to get 
inspiration on how we can improve searching (and replacing) in KWrite and 
Kate.

First, we can drop options that aren't necessary:

* "highlight all": this looks so useful to me that I wonder why there even is 
an option for it. Enable it by default and remove the option. gedit and 
IntelliJ IDEA do it by default.

* "from cursor": all 3 tested programs do not have this option, only IntelliJ 
IDEA shows it in the replace dialog. By default, they all start "from 
cursor". This is also a candidate for removal if we enable it by default.

If we remove these 2 options from the searchbar, we can even drop 
the "Options" button and replace it by the "Match case" checkbox. As an added 
bonus the user can immediately see whether he/she is doing a case insensitive 
search. (Users might wonder why they did not find all occurences when they 
didn't notice "match case" was checked.)

In Firefox and IntelliJ IDEA the searchbar is a sort of toolbar, which enables 
them to save space by using toolbuttons instead of regular, full sized 
buttons. According to the KDE HIG guidelines, we cannot consider this to be a 
toolbar because it contains complex input widgets.

A way to get rid of the "Reached bottom, continued from top" text in the 
searchbar is to replace it by some sort of tooltip shown at the location of 
last search result. This is the way IntelliJ IDEA does this; it shows the 
text "'foobar' not found, press F3 to search from the top".

As KWrite is meant to be a simple text editor, wouldn't it make more sense to 
hide the "Escape sequences", "Regular expressions", "Use Placeholders" 
and "Add" widgets in KWrite, but show them in Kate? I do not consider myself 
as a beginner, but I was a bit overwhelmed by complexity of the replacebar.


[1] IntelliJ IDEA is closed source Java IDE. Their searchbar looks like this: 
http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/img/version7/quickFindEditor.gif

-- 
// Andy Goossens
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