Yes, that’s the only way I’ve found that makes it in any way usable. It amazes me how they change things at the drop of a hat without (so it seems) thinking through the consequences of making such an “improvement”. I mean really, this is simple stuff that has been working well in countless apps for 20+ years,
Incremental search has been around since the 1980s in other popular editors like emacs.
I’ve never used emacs and for a find it is perhaps useful but when doing a find+replace it just doesn’t work. Every other editor I’ve used on the Mac (including XCode until recently) uses a return to initiate the the find operation, apart from anything else, even if you are just doing a find, if you make a mistake and hit a wrong key on the first character you are suddenly jumped off to some other spot in the file with no way to quickly return to the original position.
why all of a sudden does some (not so) bright spark at Apple think that changing the “find” operation would be a good idea, and more worryingly his boss allow it?
I love the way incremental search lets me find something with a minimal number of keystrokes. I concede that for the case discussed in this thread it’s a step back, but that honestly hadn’t occurred to me before; not sure why.
A return key is *ONE* extra keystroke and it’s a big key (on my Apple keyboard) so easy to hit with your little finger. I would say that at most it saves a 1/4 of a second having it “jump” as it does at the moment, but if you make a mistake it causes a LOT of wasted time having to find your place again rather than just hitting the delete key.
The obvious answer is to make it a Preference……… Or perhaps have a “Quick Find” and a “Full Find+Replace”.
I think both of you are falling into the conceptual trap of conflating your _individual_ experiences and use cases, with the general usability of a feature — i.e. “this doesn’t work for me, therefore whoever designed it is an idiot”.
But why change it? It wasn’t broken, it worked fine the way it was, now I have to waste time mucking about in another editor just to do a simple operation and for what? To save one keystroke. In all the time I’ve been working on Mac and on the Cocoa list, I’ve never seen anyone request a “Jumping” search facility, probably because they thought through the consequences of implementing it.
I’ve worked on a couple of widely used GUI apps (including Mail and iChat, in 10.0–10.5) and I know that nearly any time a feature is changed, even if 99% of users like it there will be somebody complaining that the new way is awful and everyone on the team should be fired.
Mail is full of bugs anyway so I’m not surprised people complained.
It depends on what the change is but in the old days things like this were a preference.