"Find Files" suggestions

Boah · Post by *Boah » 2004-06-10, 02:34 UTC

Hi,

Just a couple of fairly minor suggestions regarding the "Find in Files" dialog..

Non-modal "Find Files" dialog

Something I fairly frequently wish I could do is have more than one "Find Files" dialog open so I can do more than one search at a time, or have more than one list of results open at a time.

I know I can feed the results to the current tab in the current pane (more about this briefly below) and then do another search in another tab, but it would be nicer if you didn't have to do it in this roundabout way.

That being said...

Find Files -> Feed to listbox

Something that would be nice is being able to feed the results not only to the current tab on the current pane, but being able to feed the results to a different tab.

The way I imagine this to work would be that the "Feed to listbox" button operated a bit like the "back" and "forward" buttons in Internet Explorer by having a dropdown arrow on the button (or beside it.) Clicking this arrow drops down a list of tabs, and picking a tab feeds the results to the tab without closing the "Find in Files" dialog.

Pressing the main button would do what it currently does and feed the list to the current tab and close the dialog.

You could probably extend this so that the dropdown menu with the list of tabs has a special item "<New Tab...>" that allows you to create a new tab in the current pane to feed the list to. You could either pop up a dialog asking the user for the name of the tab or just call it "Search Results" or some such thing.

Implementing this might negate the "need" for the non-modal suggestion above.

Cheers,
Svein.

Post by *Hacker » 2004-06-11, 15:33 UTC

Non-modal "Find in Files" dialog

Search this forum for find files background, it's been discussed here a million times.

HTH
Roman

Boah · Post by *Boah » 2004-06-11, 20:49 UTC

Hacker wrote:Search this forum for find files background, it's been discussed here a million times.

Well, I did a search before I posted it, I just did one again using both your suggested search criteria and a number of others - and I did not find that many posts about it. Most of the threads were not necessarily obvious places to look for discussions about the "Find Files" dialog.

Modal Find Files dialog

Anyway, the reason I suggested it mainly was as a possibility of having more than one search results list open at the same time, and a side-effect of that would be it being non-modal. In hindsight I think this is a bad idea, not only because of the many implementation problems I can see, but also it logically makes little sense.

Feeding results to tabs of your choice

The more I think about the more I think this would be an ace feature. Especially being able to create new tabs to feed the list to. Before anyone points it out, yes I know it's possible to do already by feeding to listbox, then changing tabs, do another search and feed to listbox again. But it's a very roundabout way.

While I'm at it I agree that a single non-modal Find Files dialog would also be nice...

Cheers,
Svein.

Black Dog · Post by *Black Dog » 2004-06-12, 02:50 UTC

[face=courier]On 10-06-2004 04:34:52 +0000 Boah wrote:

B> Non-modal "Find in Files" dialog

That dialog name is "Find Files", w/o "in".

B> Something I fairly frequently wish I could do is have more
B> than one "Find in Files" dialog open

Read this.[/face]

Boah · Post by *Boah » 2004-06-12, 14:10 UTC

Black Dog wrote: That dialog name is "Find Files", w/o "in".

Yep, realised my mistake and corrected it.

Black Dog wrote: Read this.

Crap, that's recent and I missed it. Apologies. (Still, it doesn't cover the 'feed to tab(s)' suggestion above.)

All the best,
Svein.