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[Note: this is a usability bug, and I've filed it as a high priority -as a usability bug- because the Find dialog is very important and I think this is really broken] The Find dialog in the editor is very difficult to use. I'm sure the feature is there - but I haven't been able to figure it out, which I suspect means many other users will have the same problem: Let's say I want to find the third occurrence of "foo". I hit Ctrl-F, and I get the dialog. I enter "foo". Great, it finds the first hit. Now how do I get to the second??? I looked through the Find Dialog, but there is no "Next Match" button. Then I tried hitting "Enter". No, that dismissed the dialog. Then I brought up the dialog again and tried selecting Ctrl-F while the dialog is up (that's how you do repeated searching in XEmacs with incremental search). None of these methods worked. After I hit "Enter", I noticed that all the occurrences of "foo" had been highlighted yellow in my editor. So now I had to grab the scrollbar, and slide it down while scanning through my source code looking for possible matches. In a large source file, this was quite annoying. It looks like the principle of searching in NetBeans is based on "highlight all my matches" for me, as opposed to "let my cycle through my matches" which is what all other applications I've used follow. I think a possible solution here is just to add a "Next Match" (or "Find Again") button on the Find dialog.
There is "find-next" action bound to F3 by default but it's not advertized anywhere. It should become better once the editor toolbar will be there (I've checked it in yesterday) as both the find-next and find-previous (Shift+F3) are present on the toolbar.
I don't think the editor toolbar is the full answer. This kind of stuff is normally available in a menu command called "Find Next" with the shortcut F3 and it would be reasonable to provide a "find next" button in the find dialog and not dismiss the dialog every time. In many ways the whole find dialog behavior should be revisited. But,for 3.4, there ought to be at least a "Find Next" command shown in the main menu so that it is easy to discover. This isn't a new issue, either: http://ui.netbeans.org/usability/Oct_19_01/ http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=17637
I think the toolbar should be enough for now. I'm not a UI/HIE specialist but I would expect the new users to look into the toolbar and discover the shortcut. I think it's too late to add it into main menu. I would make this an enhancement and include it into the Find dialog redesign in 4.0 planning. I think there are more things that should be revised e.g. the incremental search presence in the dialog - IMHO the string to search for should be entered through the status bar line or some sort of command line that would not cover the editor pane at all. We should also finally implement the regexp search. I'm changing this to enhancement, please change it back if you disagree.
Set target milestone to TBD
I want to second the suggestion made by Miloslav to have a way of entering the search string in the status line thereby not covering up the editor pane. I'll also restate the obvious that there should also be a Find dialog like the one currently there but that having a "Find Next" (there and on the main menu) makes sense. My $0.02 worth.
*** Issue 14307 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Changing subcomponent to "search"
We would like to change the behaviour of F&R dialog. http://editor.netbeans.org/doc/Proposals/Find/Proposal.html *** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 17635 ***