On 9 Sep 2016, at 16:39, Matt Neuburg wrote:
You asked about the use case. I think what happened was that there was a space in the replace field left over from a previous search. I couldn't see it so I didn't know it was there. Thus I thought my global find-and-replace was about to delete all the seach targets but it actually replaced them with a space. This mistake was surprisingly tricky to recover from. Clearly the background color _would_ have helped me catch this, because I would have seen blocks of background color where I was expecting to see nothing!
I see, as you hint yourself, showing invisibles in the replacement preview would not necessarily have caught this, it really needs to be indicated in the replace text field.
Come to think of it, it might actually be possible to show invisibles in the fields with a “data formatter” that returns an attributed string as the “string value”.
I’m not entirely sold on this solution though, but I’ve added a note about it :)