News: [0.3.5] Search updates

Note: This is a first post to our development News category. The News category will be the place when we post updates, screenshots, and status of the current features, so you can see what’s going on and, of course discuss. The category is only for us — the developers — so please use other categories to post your discussions. Though, we encourage you to post any comments or ideas for the topics.

Along with development of AFW (our UI framewrok) we are also updating some current features to fit better your requests. The Search is one of them and this is the design notes to be achieved in 0.3.5:

• Quick Find: We are planning to add another UI for searching. You have requested the Firefox-like search, to be used for quick search. This is planned to supersede standard dialog (that is still going to be default for Replace).
• Incremental Find: (0.3.6+) Incremental find will be a most simple way on how to search text in the documents. Simple description would be: search as you type. Launching incremental find will show a little UI for entering the text. As you will type characters, it will continuously jump forward (or backward) to the matches. A feature that is planned, but not promised to be exactly in 0.3.5 (may come with update or in 0.3.6+)
• Search History: Because new search will be centralized, the search feature will be able to collect all your search requests from all search UIs. (80% implemented) The history will contain all the options you have set, and later (0.3.6+) it will be possible to convert a search history item directly to JavaScript command and edited in the Bundle Management.
• Find All: (0.3.6+) Intype will be able to select all matches and this will enable you to use all the features of multi-selections. This is currently not possible due to low performance in the selections, but the new text renderer (0.3.6+) will fix this and enable us to make it fun having hundreds of selection ranges.
• Advanced Regular Expression Editor: Is feature that actually replaces standard windows edit fields with Intype’s editing component. (already implemented) Together with regular expression grammar, syntax-highlighter, scoped commands and snippets — there’s myriad of possibilities with composing complex REs.

Thanks for info, martin. It’s also interesting to know your time estimation for release with javascript integrated into Intype (will it be 0.3.5 ?).

dflock:

• What do you mean be search highlighting?
• We will get back to blog as well. But I’d like to use blog to describe already implemented features and not the plans. Though, our plans are really fixed and always matching final implementation. We also plan to switch to the new website as of 0.4.0 where whole communication will be revitalized. I personally love talking to you guys and discuss the new features, and that’s what blog is not good for — it’s more of an official communication channel.
• There’s a lot of internal team changes pending, we are changing the responsibilities so the work will be shared better among us. My responsibilities are development, design and communication, Ivan is managing and developing the website, and Juraj is focusing on the development and optimization.

mvm: Yes, the first JS API will be available in 0.3.5. I’ll we writing about it here as well.

Yarden: Well, Firefox is using Quick Find bar for Incremental searching, however, there’s a slight difference between editor and viewer (what firefox actually is). We have separated these features for now, until we do some user testing with it, and find whether to merge
the two will be a good idea.

dflock: Yeah, this feature is actually possible, but the real usability is disputable. We are planning to do some tests to ensure that such feature is reasonable.

Are there any plans to introduce a Dreamweaver like “search results” panel, that will list all the matches found/replacements made in the most recent search/replace, and allow you to jump straight to them? If not, could this be implemented as a plugin perhaps? I find this feature really useful.