The Scope of Search And Replace (reposted)

[talleyrand]

The one thing that kills me if I'm not thinking, is the default scope behaviour of search and replace.

* If there is a newline character in the highlighted text, the scope defaults to Selected Text.
* If there is no newline in the highlighted text, the scope defaults to Active Document.
* If there is nothing highlighted, it defaults to Active Document.

The first and the last, I understand but the second I don't. It would seem proper to me to default the behaviour to Selected Text if there is highlighted text.

If I'm doing a selective replacement of text within a section, I'll highlight what's important, hit F8, set my search, hit Tab set my replacement criteria and hit Enter. My problem is that if I'm only doing a subset of a line (and haven't caught the newline character), the default scope of S&R is the Active Document.

Since posting the original poll, I've grown more accustomed to checking the number of occurences found to make sure they jive with what I'd expect and that's saved my bacon a time or two. While I understand the point jlacasse made {they thought the behaviour was correct as they use the highlighted text as their search criteria} I still feel it'd be more intuitive to set the default to selected text.