Re: NSTextFinder guide
Re: NSTextFinder guide
- Subject: Re: NSTextFinder guide
- From: Quincey Morris <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2017 11:06:02 -0700
On Mar 20, 2017, at 04:49 , Daryle Walker <email@hidden> wrote:
>
> Is it possible for a find-next from the table view’s last location to jump to the text view’s first location whenever the text view is active?
> I’m on the fence whether this is a good user interaction, though
This is likely not the answer you were looking for, but I think the correct answer is that your UI isn’t properly/fully designed yet. What you seem to have done is to choose an implementation strategy (table view, tabs, text view) *first*, then tried to work out how to adapt your app design to the implementation. This is backwards, and the fact that you now have UI questions you don’t know how to answer demonstrates why doing it backwards isn’t a great idea.
(Of course, we all do this backwards, to some degree, because we want to get on and … you know … get something done. The trick is not to do this too soon.)
In particular, the implementation elements you’ve fixed on (table view, tabs, text view) relate mainly to the simultaneous *visibility* of fragments of the whole document. While it may have initially seemed like a good idea to hide the parts of the documents that precede the current “edit”, the issue of searching may suggest this isn’t such a good idea. Maybe it ought to be possible to show all found strings within a single view, which maybe suggests you need a way of representing the previous fragments in the editing view (perhaps collapsed in some way that can be expanded to show found strings). I don’t know the answer, but I think you need to spend more time thinking about your UI design.
Incidentally, if you want a model for the kind of UI you currently have, you can look at Xcode. It has an editing pane, and a separate navigator pane that’s a list of other fragments (source files) of your app, although it doesn’t show content in the navigator. Xcode’s solution is to have two separate find functions (in-editor and global). Thinking about that should give you a general idea of what your app would be like if the text view find was completely separate from the table view find.
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