Saturday, August 18, 2007

Status: Improving Eclipse Search

My greatest fear ( getting sick ) for SoC has become true this summer and it forced me to sleep / lie down doing nothing for about a week. However, I have another small addition for Find/Replace facilities.

This enhancement is Emacs style "Case Sensitive Replace". Here's the bug:

Retain Caps When Replacing - https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=28949

It's waiting for code review.

About "Highlight All": I've received feedback from Daniel and I believe I'll complete the patch with a final blow. I should say that as a user, I find these two enhancements quite handy.

About lightweight Find/Replace: I've seen that the area below the editor is not sufficient for displaying the bar completely. It looks good under the editor when resized but the area below the editor is small in width in a vanilla Eclipse install.

To overcome this, I think that it's best to form the bar as a Trim contribution (top/bottom). This way, we'll have a pretty good amount of width and the users that want to use the bar in some other place will also be satisfied.

However we need to resolve bugs like https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=195776 first. We need to have a bottom trim that can resize itself when contributions do not fit. I discussed the issue with Eric Moffatt and he said that we'll have TrimLayout improvements in M3 and M4. In this case, I'm thinking of creating this "lightweight Find/Replace" as a trim contribution and use the coolbar (which wraps and resizes correctly) for now. When we have Eric's improvements, we can carry it to the bottom trim as in Firefox.

Feel free to comment (especially on this last paragraph). :)

Have a nice weekend,

2 comments:

Eugene Kuleshov said...

It will be a baig shame if you use Trim. My status bar is already busy, so there is no place for anything like trim. Besides, the trim doesn't really makes sense, because it is a global UI element, while search is specific to the given editor, i.e. if you'll have two editor tabs next to each other (both editors are visible at the same time) it won't be obvious, which one is being searched.

I am not sure what screen resolution we are talking about that search bar doesn't have enough width, but there should some workarounds, i.e. remove text from the buttons on search bar and/or move those buttons to the popup menu, so user could still use shortcut keys.

Unknown said...

I'm new to Eclipse, I was wondering if there's a Find view that could be added. For instance, ctrl+f, would bring up a find view. Find/Search would then LIST all the occurrences with line numbers. Selecting a row would then take you to the file/line in question. Is there such a plugin/functionality?