GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 663260
Find keyboard shortcuts are confusing and differ from many other applications
Last modified: 2012-05-05 16:12:43 UTC
The new Find dialog in Gedit 3 has keybindings and behavior that are very confusing, and go against common bindings/behaviors found in many other major applications. It seems that it's trying to emulate an "inline" search box much like Firefox search. However, unlike Firefox (or Gedit 2, or really any app I've used), the <enter> key doesn't move to the next result, and the <esc> key jumps to the top of the document. After weeks of use, I still find myself accidentally putting a series of newlines into a document, because I habitually press <enter> to move to the next result, only to see that I'm typing into the document instead. Likewise, after I locate a result I'm looking for, I habitually press <esc> to close the dialog, only to find myself back at the top of the document with my result lost. I actually had to do a Google search to find out how to move to the next result: <ctrl+g>, a shortcut I've never seen before. If it can't be <enter>, like most other programs, it should at least be <f3>, like every other program that doesn't use <enter>. Straying so widely from common shortcuts and behaviors found in many other major applications for such a frequently-used and common feature is very confusing and user-unfriendly.
Apologies, I somehow submitted this to "glade" instead of "gedit". Can a mod change the assignment to the correct group?
I fixed the "assigned to." Thanks for mentioning the ctrl+g shortcut -- I had been looking for this, and it's not easily discoverable. Gedit folks, was it an intentional change to no longer use <enter> to move between results? As Alexander mentioned, I find myself putting a lot of unintentional newlines in my documents.
Apparently it was intentional, according to this bug: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=650471. This is more than a disagreement it's just wrong. I used to praise gedit for being intuitive and easy to use. This severely limits the productivity of my text editing. Some steps you can take as an end user to *start* to bring the functionality back to normal. You can change the accels (keyboard shortcuts), but this won't change the fact that you can't use enter or escape the way they are meant to. Changing using the GUI 1. Open (or install if you don't have the package) dconf-editor. In ubuntu the package is "dconf-tools". 2. Navigate to org->gnome->desktop->interface 3. Check the checkbox labeled "can-change-accels" 4. Now with gedit open, open the menu and hover your mouse over the entry you want to change. 5. Hit the delete key to clear it. 6. Hit the key combination you want to set it (remember you can't use enter because it will take the action in the menu instead of setting it as a shortcut!). 7. Don't forget to disable "can-change-accels" again otherwise your menus will be in edit mode in all of your applications! 8. As a note, gedit will permanently store your accel change to disk upon closing. Changing using the command-line/accels file 1. I'm not sure, but the file might not exist yet if you haven't tried to edit through the GUI, but it probably will. 2. Navigate to <home_folder>/.config/gedit 3. Edit accels (do it in "vi" or "pico" some other editor, as closing gedit will save whatever it was using in the UI to disk and erase your changes) 4. Find the keys and change their binding in this file. In our case, at the very least, you can change find previous using the line: (gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/GeditWindowActions/SearchFindPrevious" "<Shift>Return") 5. Note that you have to remove the ";" from the beginning of the line to uncomment it and have your change take effect. This still doesn't solve the fact that you can't use enter and that escape doesn't work correctly. I will be looking into a patch that users can at least use for the time being. The last time I had to patch something it was when file-roller intentionally removed using type-complete to select entries. They said that using search replaces this. Let's just say they changed their mind and added it back eventually. To the developers, if you really want to stick with this method of implementing find, AT LEAST put in a compatibility mode setting or something that will revert the keybindings/search behavior back to the *more efficient* standard. I will post back with more info once I have a patch.
Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 650471 ***