Let's discuss Find/Replace...

Ian D. Mead,
President

One of our absolute goals at IDM is to continuously seek text editing perfection. We go about this in a variety of ways. First and foremost is the user driven development model we have followed for better than 14 years. Secondly, we keep pace with technology because we are focused on meeting the needs (and exceeding the expectations) of our user community and the many disciplines that depend on IDM for their solution.

These needs span the addition of new features and technologies as well as the ongoing development and enhancement of existing features. One feature in which we have spent much time on in the past few versions is Find/Replace and in particularly, Find in Files (FIF) because Find is so central to what our users do on a daily basis with UltraEdit/UEStudio.

The evolution of the find/replace dialog in UltraEdit

For many years, UltraEdit and UEStudio have enjoyed superb performance and accuracy in Find/Replace operations because of the way our proprietary Edit Control Engine (ECE) and associated functions load and scan files. The Find and Replace dialog also includes regular expressions that allow searching the current file, open files, or all files in a directory or on a disk.

Advancements in technology, in particularly multi-core processor PCs, have allowed us to leverage even more performance and speed from the ECE by "threading" Find requests which allow the computer to process commands in parallel, thus independently leveraging multiple cores.

These additional efforts started to benefit our users with the release of version 13.00 and have carried through to our most recent release, v14.00.

In v13.00 we added:

• Search in Favorite files
• Search and Replace will step through all open files
• Search in Files for any files not containing search string
• User customizable format of Search in Files result

v13.10

• Ability to refresh List Lines Containing String

v13.20

• Find improvements
• Favorites button for Search and Replace
• Find in Files in a separate thread
• Find in Files to optionally pick up word under cursor
• Search string now displayed in 'Not Found' dialog box
• Options for auto-reset of find settings in configuration
• Macro search string no longer added to Find history

In v14.00 we have added even more powerful tools in Find/Replace to extend the functionality to column ranges and multi-line searches.

• Redesigned and enhanced Find and Replace Dialogs
  • Multi-line scrollable text boxes
  • Collapsible Advanced options
  • Ability to search in specified column range

Today's threaded Find operations allow much more fidelity and performance while searching large files. The sum of our innovations and performance enhancements have transformed FIF into a more powerful tool that allows users of UltraEdit and UEStudio greater functionality and enhanced productivity.

As with all development, we seek your input on how we can further improve upon our features. I invite your comments and ideas on how we can further enhance FIF and all our find/replace functionality to better provide you with the solutions you need.

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Eric Miner
Posts: 4

Find lines not matching search criteria
Reply #6 on : Tue March 18, 2008, 09:56:09

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UE Find is terrific! I'd love to have one more option. A check box that signals UE to find the lines that do NOT match the given search criteria. Today I have to save my file(s) to our UNIX server in order to do a 'grep -v' command against the file to get that functionality.

Ian D. Mead
Posts: 4

Find lines not matching search criteria
Reply #5 on : Tue March 18, 2008, 20:19:14

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Eric,

I like the idea. We have discussed this internally before. We are now looking at what it would take. Thanks for bringing it up!

Best wishes Ian

Chris Ward
Posts: 4

Find and Replace
Reply #4 on : Thu March 20, 2008, 10:52:40

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When the User is editing text in the dialog window, hitting the "Return" key should mean "new line" and not "run the command"

Tim Dawson
Posts: 4

Counting occurrences in selected text
Reply #3 on : Thu March 20, 2008, 16:13:10

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Could it be possible to count the number of occurrences of a string in Selected Text ? At present it only seems possible in the entire file. I wanted to count the number of global variables I'd declared in a PHP script, and counting '$' in selected text would to offer a possibility.

Ian
Posts: 2

Find and Replace
Reply #2 on : Thu March 20, 2008, 18:43:29

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Chris,

Thanks for the feedback. To enter a return, use Ctrl+Enter. This is pretty much standard in such dialogs and also provides the default action of Enter executing the command that most users desire. Otherwise, many users would end up with an additional return in their find/replace strings.

Thanks, Ian

Ian
Posts: 2

Counting occurrences in selected text
Reply #1 on : Thu March 20, 2008, 18:45:21

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Tim,

Thanks for the suggestion. We understand the need for count all in selected text/region.
We are actually looking at this for the next release. It's not comitted yet but it's on the high possibility list.

Thanks again, Ian

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