Search-box Workflow Optimizations

[fromagi]

I find myself eagerly turning to novelWriter as my drafting environment of choice, though there is one area where I'd like to suggest QoL improvements -- the search bar.

• Having the search text highlighted either: 1) when it is re-opened after being closed/minimized with populated content, and 2) if accessed via keyboard shortcut after being already open and populated.
• A "highlight all" feature flag to visually represent all matches at a glance (and then being able to cycle through them as is currently implemented).

Expanding the presentation and fluidity of searching would be much appreciated! Thank you for sharing novelWriter with the community... I found your project after it was mentioned on /r/writing.

[vkbo]

Thanks, these are both good suggestions.

The first one is trivial, and a one-line change. I can certainly do that.

The second one is a little more complicated. Currently, the search feature is just a wrapper for the built-in "find" feature in the underlying Qt text editor. It only searches in a step-wise manner. I can probably extract the necessary information by making a dry run search first and find all the locations, but highlighting them are a bit more tricky. There are some serious performance bottlenecks between th Python and C++ side in PyQt5 when it comes to iterate over paragraphs for the highlighting class on larger documents.

But I'll have a look at it and see if I can make something work at least.

[fromagi]

Much appreciated on both fronts! Perhaps a decent consolation for the highlight-all bottleneck could be a counter showing "X of N" to allow writers a way to quickly ascertain the amount of hits for their given search term. My motivation here is that I often turn to this sort of impromptu search to prevent redundant word choices.

Thanks again -- I am very much looking forward to future releases.

[vkbo]

Ah, I see. Doing a dry run search will certainly get the count. That I can implement. It should be very fast too. I have it on my ideas list anyway. There's also a request for a replace all feature that will also benefit from that in #545.

[vkbo]

After having postponed this for about 4 releases, I have finally added a counter to the search tool. It should be a part of release 1.6.