[TxMt] Re: another wish for the global Find dialog

[Matt Neuburg]

> On Sep 9, 2016, at 3:11 AM, Allan Odgaard <mailinglist at textmate.org> wrote:
> 
> Would you want the “Show Invisibles” limited to only the match/replacement string (in the search results)? As I assume if we render all invisibles, it’ll look rather busy.

Well, I work with "Show Invisibles" turned on all the time, and I regard this as useful and normal, not "busy". It's one of TextMate's indispensable features! So I don't imagine that things would look all that different with "Show Invisibles" applied to the search results. Maybe my imagination is failing here, but I don't see what would be wrong with rendering all of them.

Personally, I find the bold-plus-background-color in the screen shot "busy". But perhaps I'll feel differently when it comes along in the regular releases and I actually use it.

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!

(Even then, though, the onus would have been on me to click in the Replace field so as to get the replaced version of the search results. That is why I was hoping we could show spaces in the search and replace fields themselves.)

m.

--
matt neuburg, phd = http://www.apeth.net/matt/
pantes anthropoi tou eidenai oregontai phusei
Programming iOS 9! http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920044352.do
iOS 9 Fundamentals! http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920044345.do
RubyFrontier! http://www.apeth.com/RubyFrontierDocs/default.html