increasing the usability of search dialogs

[Luciano Montanaro]

On Tuesday 16 May 2006 13:03, David Faure wrote:
> On Tuesday 16 May 2006 11:19, Luciano Montanaro wrote:
> > They don't really get in my way most of the time--like when searching
> > for a particular word.
>
> Regexps do get in the way when you don't want to use them, e.g. if you
> look for "e.g." you'll get hits on "eggs" since "." means "any character"
> in a regexp. So it is important that regexps are disabled by default and
> only enabled when the user checks the checkbox.

Sure thy are not fool-proof. I'd just use e\.\g\. in the case. And (anyway), 
you *also* find "e.g." with the given expression...

What I'd like to have, is for a way to specify that I, for example, would 
like searches to always use regexps when possible, with case sensitivity, 
and that the dialog should be collapsed to a bar to the bottom of the 
window.

Currently, for example, here in the kmail message editor, F3 brings up a 
simple "find" dialog, centered, with only "case sensitivity" and 
"direction" options. KWrite dialog offers more, and I see no reasons to 
have less options here. I'd be glad to also have incremental search in both 
editors, with the first and subsequent matches highlighted... I could find 
my text hitting fewer keys.

I'll have to stress that defaults should be geared towards novice users, but 
there is no reason to tie the hands of those that can handle a little more. 
Since the underlying system allows that anyway.

Luciano

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