Ctrl-F to bring up find dialog when nothing highlighted

[Brent212]

I've been using textpad for what feel like 20 years, and using F5 to bring up the find dialog has always been annoying, but I've never thought about it enough to think of an alternative until now.

I really like how ctrl-F jumps to the next instance of what I'm looking for. But I think I only do that when I've already got one instance highlighted. At least 90-99% of the time, anyway, if not 100%.

It'd be nice to at least have an option to change the default so ctrl-F pops up the find dialog when nothing's highlighted.

I'm constantly highlighting something in a web document, alt-tabbing over to a file in textpad to look for it, and I dread the move to look down and lift up my hand to hit F5 in the process. Would be great to be able to just ctrl-F.

[AmigoJack]

1. window menu Configure > Preferences
2. in the treeview on the left select Keyboard
3. in Categories select "Search", in Commands select "SearchFind"
4. in Current keys select its "F5" entry, then click Remove button
5. in Press new shortcut key press literally what you want, then click Assign button

Likewise you can remove Ctrl+F from the "SearchFindNext" command.

Completely configuring your shortcuts has been there for decades already. I'm pretty sure I've used this in TextPad 4 already.

[Brent212]

Yeah, I'm aware of that option. But as I said, I like ctrl-F jumping to the next instance. I just want it to function differently when nothing's highlighted. But yeah, having a separate shortcut for the dialog is a decent workaround.

[AmigoJack]

Oh, now I get what you want - I missed understanding that because finding the next match is in my logic unrelated to the current selection (and I was far more used to F3 doing exactly that: either asking me for the search to issue or continuing to the next match). So indeed you're looking for a command that yet doesn't exist, like "SearchFindSelNext" which behaves like "SearchFind" with no selection and like "SearchFindNext" when there is a any selection. Shouldn't be difficult to add that to the program...