Stand alone Find Next/Find Previous buttons

[Amadawn]

Hi,

the new Find dialog in v5.3 is greatly improved from previous versions. In particular the "Find all in current document" button is great!

However, I think that the dialog could still be improved further to make it easier to search Up and Down the file. Thus I'd like to make a proposal.

Currently, to change the direction of your search you must first select "Up" or "Down" on the "Direction" panel and then click "Find Next". This has several drawbacks:

- It requires 2 clicks in different parts of the Find dialog each time that you want to change the direction of your search.
- Whenever you open the "Find dialog" you must check the search direction, since Notepad++ remembers your last selection. It is quite easy to search Up when you want to search "Down" by accident.

Instead, it would be much simpler to remove the "Direction (Up/Down)" panel and add a "Find previous" button next to the current "Find next" button.

I think that this solution would be much better than the current version of the dialog for several reasons:

- To change the direction of your search you would only need to click on the button corresponding to the desired direction. This means that instead of moving your mouse to the "Direction" panel, clicking on the desired direction, moving back to the "Find next" button and clicking it, now you could simply move the mouse to the button corresponding to the desired direction, and click it. Since both buttons would be next to each other, not only you would need fewer clicks, but also much less mouse movement.
- You would not need to check or remember the last selected search direction every time that you open the Find Dialog. You would simply open the dialog and click on the button corresponding to the desired search direction.

Also, for the sake of clarity, the buttons could also be named "Find Down" and "Find Up" rather than "Find Next" and "Find Previous".

What do you guys think? Quite a few people a know use Notepad++ and they like it a lot, but many agree that searching up and down is a bit annoying.

Cheers,

Amadawn

[Amadawn]

Hi JR,

I am using the English version, so there is no problem with the access keys.

The suggestion I am making is for those cases in which you are using the "Find dialog". In those cases you would not normally use the access keys. Instead you normally use the buttons in the dialog, right?

So, what I am suggesting is a way to try to improve the Find Dialog a little. I really do not see any advantage in having a panel plus 2 checkboxes to select the search direction when a single button to search up and another to search down would work much better.

Also, now that we are talking about improving the Find Dialog, I also do not see much use for the "Transparency panel". In my opinion those options belong to the Settings, not to the Find Dialog itself.

Cheers,

Amadawn

[joergenr]

Hi Amadawn 

I don't know which localization you use. In the English version you can use the access keys Alt+u and Alt+d to change the search direction. If your locale doesn't  support that, write to your localizer. Perhaps he will add the access keys.

JR