Re: Xcode 4 UI customizability curiosities
Re: Xcode 4 UI customizability curiosities
- Subject: Re: Xcode 4 UI customizability curiosities
- From: Joar Wingfors <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2013 23:46:27 -0800
On 23 jan 2013, at 22:27, Rick Mann <email@hidden> wrote:
>
> On Jan 23, 2013, at 21:56 , Joar Wingfors <email@hidden> wrote:
>
>>> Any way to get a separate search & replace dialog instead of that banner across the top?
>>
>>
>> No. What's your reason for preferring a separate panel?
>
> Many reasons, I'll try to explain:
>
> - That search area is too small, so many of the options are hidden. It's a lot of steps to reveal the options and set things. Moreover, many of the choices are in menus, so you can't see all your options at once; you have to go hunting for them.
>
> - I can't open the search, set my search critera, and "do" the search, and have focus return to the document. But my *attention* returns to the document. So I frequently end up either undoing (one replace too many), or typing, and having those actions affect one of the search fields, not the text I'm staring at in the document.
>
> To close the search bar quickly from the keyboard, I have to hit ESC, which is still conceptually for me a "cancel" operation, as in, I want to cancel my search. "Do"ing the search doesn't dismiss that search bar.
>
> This is typically what I do, very very quickly in something like text wrangler:
>
> - Command-E to enter the currently-selected text into the search field.
> - Command-F to bring up the search dialog.
> - Tab to tab into the replace dialog (which is, by default, not shown in the Xcode search bar, although I mostly fixed that by changing key assignments).
> - Type my new text
> - possibly adjust search criteria, with a click or two of a checkbox (no menus to pore over).
> - hit enter, which finds the first result.
> - Command G to find the next, or Command L to replace and find next.
>
> If I go too far, or realize I set the search parameters incorrectly, undo works immediately; I don't have to first get out of the search bar focus.
>
> By the way, 4.5.2 has a really mind-numbing bug where undo frequently undoes the change, and then puts the insertion point at the top of the document and scrolls there. Very disorienting. No amount of undo/redo gets me back to where I was. (I have long used a quick undo/redo to get myself back to where I was typing).
If you can provide a set of steps to reproduce that issue, please file a bug report!
> This series of steps is very fast for me, but I can't seem to learn an equivalent in Xcode, especially since I go back to other editors frequently.
How about:
* Select the first entry, and Cmd+E to set the search string
* Type to replace the first entry, select and Cmd+Shift+E to set the replace string
* Cmd+G to find the next match
* Invoke Replace and Find Next repeatedly to walk through the remaining matches
I prefer to do most of my finding and replacing from the keyboard like this. Works well enough for me, as I don't feel that I have to modify my find options frequently.
> A separate dialog (or even a sheet, although I hate waiting for the animation, but I can fix that) can also allow for much larger find & replace fields.
>
> One other bit: Text Wrangler lets me type "option-Tab" or "option-Return" to enter tab and return characters into the S&R fields, but that's an enhancement request.
Both Option+Tab and Option+Return work in Xcode. Not too surprising, given that I believe that they're provided by the Cocoa text system.
Joar
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