Find and replace

Designing find and replace for naracea was so much fun for me.

You know, I’ve always felt somehow dissatisfied with how searching works in most text editors. There are usually two things: a) find next/find previous and b) find all. And once you edit something in front of the text you have searched for, you must search again, because search results are not being updated. Let’s face it: every search engine struggling with limited browser abilities have better UI for search results than most of desktop text editors backed with all those fine tuned UI frameworks.

So after a short period when I was considering going the usual way, I decided to try to do something little more user friendly with search:

What we have here is seemingly the usual set of next/prev/all buttons, including some replace buttons (because I believe finding and replacing are related so much in text editing, that they should never be split in two windows).

As you can see, results contain a lot of additional information. There is text surrounding matched term, so it is easier to see which result is the right one and there is information about position in the text. Also document and branch where the match was found are there. And as the finishing touch, there is replace button on each result item, so you can replace the matched text right there, without moving the mouse pointer to the top of the window.

Also: searching for something else (or in some other document or document’s branch) doesn’t necessarily clear the results. It is possible to have listing of several searches in the results list. Clicking on the result will take you to document, branch and text position of the match.

But what happens if we insert or delete some characters in the text? Right, the search results get updated as the text changes, so even after you edited the document, the results are still pointing to that one occurrence of the text we have searched for.

This seems more like what I would like to have in all text editors with find and replace.

When this was finished, I’ve started thinking how timeline, while useful, is just not enough to make all those stored changes really useful. To be really able to find something in history of the document there needs to be a way to search it.

And here it is: by selecting “Search the text and its history” in combobox above the replace all and find all buttons, you can search the whole history of the document. Of course, it is not possible to replace anything, because as we know history cannot be changed, but using this feature you can easily find whatever text you’ve written though the whole existence of the document:

Of course, for long documents, it takes some time to go through all the changes and find all occurrences of the word or sentence, so the searching of the history runs asynchronously, and it is possible to write more text while the search is ongoing. The search always starts at the current change and the changes are rewound one by one and the rewound document is then searched for the search term.

So this is how search and replace works in naracea. There are couple of interesting scenarios which are enabled by the history searches, but I’ll keep these for future posts.