GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 419805
Find window obscures text
Last modified: 2010-09-09 21:17:35 UTC
The bug has been opened on https://launchpad.net/bugs/93347 "Binary package hint: gedit Just a wishlist bug; when looking for text, the Find window obscures the central portion of the screen, which can block the searched-for text. Contrast to how its done in Firefox (something along these lines would be great). This will probably have to be dealt with upstream, but I thought I'd mention it. http://librarian.launchpad.net/6850837/gedit-search1.png Where's the penguin? Some screenshots... http://librarian.launchpad.net/6850840/gedit-search2.png You have to move the Find window away; this is like how it was in IE when I still used Windows (bad ;) http://librarian.launchpad.net/6850843/firefox-search.png Here's how they do it in Firefox; just spiffy! :)"
I'm sure you'd love the incremental search (it's in the search menu as well). Bottom bad didn't work well with the panes when we tried it.
Created attachment 84913 [details] Incremental Search has the same problem, just to a lesser extent
Incremental search does seem like an attempt to solve this bug but as pointed out in comment 2, it doesn't. Also, I don't get why there is a need for two ways to search. One almost fixed and one completely broken...
(In reply to comment #1) > Bottom bad didn't work well with the panes when we tried it. Maybe you could elaborate a bit, please?
Even automatically moving the dialog away from the selected text would be a solution. If I remember well, Kate does it.
A moving dialog has some nasty usability issues.
For example? Personally I found it practical.
You can't e.g. hit next twice in a row without moving the mouse pointer if the dialog happened to obscure the search result. Instead you will press somewhere in the main window. Also, there is value in implementing the find functionality the same other GNOME applications do it. Evince, Epiphany, Yelp, etc. all implement it with a find bar at the bottom the way Firefox does it. I'm sure there are a11n issues as well.
I totally agree about the firefox-like solution being better. My proposal was to be intended as a temporary quite simple fix while we wait for a better one. This bug has been already waiting for two and a half years, and even if it is not something critical, it is quite annoying.
I also think this is very important, but instead of embedding the search bar in the bottom, why not provide with a preference to select whether on the top or on the bottom? (I would personally select top)
This bug has been *ahem* bugging me for a while. It is a big visual inconsistency that Gedit is the only app I use frequently that has a find dialog like this. Even if I had no problems with a find dialog (which I do anyway), this visual inconsistency alone is completely... inconsistent (as well as relatively annoying). On a technical coding note, it would seem as though it would be relatively simple to reuse code from evince, devhelp, or something similar.
Just as a side note, we are planning to rework the find/replace in the upcoming development cycle.
tell me if you need designs for this.
Created attachment 168907 [details] quick mockup
I don't know if there is another bug open with this, but I was pointed out by nacho on IRC that he's working [1] on fixing the search dialog to be smaller and closer in design to what Chrome does (yup, the markers on the side too, but that is waiting for a GTK+ patch) [2]. This will also sport arrows for next and previous. Paolo also mentioned that this would become the primary search method (and using ctrl+f) and that the old dialog would only remain for search and replace. Regarding comment 2: It does indeed, but so does an entire line of chrome. If the search field can go as far to the right as possible, I think we can avoid covering the text in the majority of the text files people are dealing with (this introduces a very small visual hierarchy issue, but I think it's worth it in this case). 1. http://blogs.gnome.org/nacho/2010/08/10/gsoc-weekly-report-11/ 2. http://jimstips.com/wp-content/uploads/images/stories/chrome/google-chrome-01-03.jpg
The chrome like search dialog has landed in master. There are still some things to do like the arrows commented in the previous comment.
Now that I added the arrow buttons I think we can mark this as fixed.