Closing the Search Results window does very bad things

[stickboy]

With TextPad 5.0.2 on Windows XP SP2:

1. Open a file.
2. Select View > Search Results
3. With keyboard focus in the Search Results window, press Ctrl+W (or go to File > Close). The contents of the Search Results should be closed, but the docked pane itself remains.
4. Select File > Close All.

Result:
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TextPad
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Unexpected and unrecoverable error. Would you like to save a diagnostic file?
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Yes No
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More issues:
Once you get into the state where the Search Results pane is visible but without content, additional attempts to do Search > Find in Files do nothing.

It'd really be nice (and it'd probably avoid these issues) if Ctrl+W closed the search results pane instead of removing its content.

[bbadmin]

This will be fixed in the next release, which is imminent. In the meantime, please use the Search Results and Tool Output commands, on the View menu, to close those windows.

[ACRobin]

For information the error can be re-created on Win2000.

The error message is not the same - "DBGHELP.DLL too old to create dump file" and then later as the application closes an error log is created.

[stickboy]

It's much better now, but when using Ctrl+W to close the Search Results or Tool Output panes, keyboard focus doesn't return to the main document pane.

[OnlyTextPad]

Ctrl + F5 , search item, press Enter
the search Results window does not have focus - have to click on it with the mouse ; (
If I press Shift + F11 it will hide the Search results window , and the focus is ok
If I press Shift + F11 again the Search Results windows is blank!!! - if that is on purpose it is bad logic - e.g. it assumes that ones you have clicked on a result of yours it should be the right one, which eliminates the rest of the search - well allmost the whole search feature !!!

I consider this as a bug - the way to fix it would be to have activation of the search window with keyboard shortcut - Shift + F11 and again Shift + F11 , would activate it again with all contents .



My personal opinion is that Search Results should not be floating or it should be settable to floating or tab (compare Opera implementation of panels )

also after pressing the enter and committing the search the focus should be on the search window, so that one could quickly go to the desired line

Search results should be nulled each time a search is performed OR this should be configurable via Options






Windows XP , SP2 , TextPad 5.0.3

[ak47wong]

I agree with everything you said. The Search Results pane in v5.x is a constant source of frustration and confusion for me. I do hope an option is forthcoming to use a separate document for the Search Results like in v4.x.

Andrew

[athlon]

YES! Please please reinstate the search results opening as a document (which looks like a regular document except that it defaults to read only and has hyperlinks to files) functionality. I used it all the time in version 4, and now must uninstall version 5 and reinstall version 4 just to be able to use it.

My job involves going through a large app, which means I often need to locate a pivotal variable among the entire system to see when and hwo it gets set.

For this, I need an entire screen's worth of search results to easily identify the matches of interest, and also so I can easily switch back and forth between a full screen of search results and the file I'm working in.

[el_tonto]

For this, I need an entire screen's worth of search results to easily identify the matches of interest, and also so I can easily switch back and forth between a full screen of search results and the file I'm working in.

My work-around is to make the search results pane very large, then set to auto-hide. In Preferences->Keyboard, select "View" in category and then the "ActivateSearchResults" Command, and assign ctrl-` (or ctrl-~) as a shortcut key. IMO this is an improvement on ctrl-tab, because it doesn't continue to cycle through all your other documents that you have open.

(I use ctrl-` because it lies right beside ctrl-tab, so the hand naturally falls there)

[neilbl]

One of the nicest features of the "old" Textpad was the ability to manipulate the Search results. It was possible to search, then change the properties of the Search so that I could read and write in the window, then use Find to remove lines I was not interested in, then re-instate the "Read only" status, and do an "Open All" on the remaining lines. This technique is immensely powerful, and has saved me hours and hours of boring work.

In fact, the ability to write in the "Search results" window was so useful that I wrote a program looking for certain circumstances (unmatched tags in an SGML document, if you must know), which output the results in the "Search results" format. Then I could do a search for an arbitrary piece of text, overlay these results with the results from my program, and then do an "Open All", pinpointing the lines of text that needed fixing. Beautiful!

In V5 I am unable to do this. I'll stick with V5 for a while - after all, the only way I can really find out its strengths and weaknesses is to be using it in a live situation. But even though the new resizable "Find" window is attractive, if I can't tweak my Search results, I will be back to Version 4.

[ak47wong]

Hey neilbl, that's pretty cool. I didn't know you could do that with the old Search Results window. Maybe Helios didn't either?

Andrew

[neilbl]

Thanks, Andrew. Glad you like it.

I find it hard to believe that Helios didn't deliberately design the Search window so it could be edited. But given that they have removed this functionality in V5, maybe it was accidental. I hope they reinstate it. Not something I do often, but when I do, it speeds things up immensely.

[vapspwi]

I find it hard to believe that Helios didn't deliberately design the Search window so it could be edited. But given that they have removed this functionality in V5, maybe it was accidental. I hope they reinstate it. Not something I do often, but when I do, it speeds things up immensely.

I only just realized that V5 was out, so I downloaded and installed 5.0.3. I occasionally use the Search Results in the way that you described above, and it appears that in 5.0.3 it's working pretty much like it used to.

When I have search results, I can double click the "read only" item in the status bar to make the file writable, then delete extraneous stuff from the search results, then re-enable "read only" status.

JRjr

[neilbl]

When I have search results, I can double click the "read only" item in the status bar to make the file writable, then delete extraneous stuff from the search results, then re-enable "read only" status.

Interesting. I didn't attempt to edit the Search results in this way until I had "undocked" the window. Maybe the process of undocking upsets things. Unfortunately, I couldn't work out how to "dock" the window - so I can't test under these conditions. Perhaps you could undock the window and see if the behaviour is as I describe it? (Or tell me how to dock the window )

[ak47wong]

neilbl, it does indeed work in v5.0.3, even if the Search Results window is undocked. You need to toggle the read-only status of the window using CTRL+Q, E.

To dock the Search Results window, drag it over the main application window and you should see a number of dock icons appear. Drop the window onto one of the icons.

Andrew

[neilbl]

Thanks, Andrew. You are right. However, I am right too! If you undock the Search window, then you can't change the Read status of the Search window by clicking the Read indicator on the status bar - which is the way that I have always changed the Read status. The problem is that the focus changes to the main TextPad window, and therefore the status that you change is the status of the active document in the main window.

If you dock the Search window, then you can change the Read status by double-clicking the Read indicator. (If you have no document open, and you double-click the Read indicator, it disappears. However, you can toggle the status again by clicking where it should be.)

As you say, the Ctrl+Q, E method works, regardless of whether the Search window is docked or undocked. And since I prefer key-strokes to mouse clicks (much faster), I should train myself to use the key-strokes.

Thanks for the info about the docking points. I did see these points when I was attempting to dock the Search window - I just didn't realise that I needed to place the cursor over one. I guess I should take a little time to read the Help!

I was going to grumble that Alt+0 wasn't working to change focus to the clip library. But when I read the Help, I found out how to reassign the shortcut (for some reason, it had been allocated to Alt+2). So now I have nothing to grumble about. Bother!