wish for the enhancement of the functionality of "Find"

[Clemens Grabmayer <clemens@…>]

Dear JLaTeXEditor-developers,

I have a wish concerning an enhancement of the functionality
of the "Find" operation in the editor, a feature that I
was used to from XEmacs.

When using backspace in the Find-file (perhaps after having
made a typing error, or after having actually found the
occurrence of the search-string and wanting to go back to
the place where I started with the search) I would like
that the editor backtracks to the first occurrence of the
shortened search-string, and hence successively, when I
backspace to the empty search-string, to go back to the
cursor position from which I started the search.

Furthermore, using backspace on a search-string "abc" which has
actually been found e.g. 3 times in a text by repeating the search
3 times, XEmacs behaves as follows: when using backspace for the
first three times the "c" at the end is not removed, but
backtracking to the earlier 2 occurrences of "abc" is carried out
by XEmacs; after that the same backtracking happens to repeated
earlier searches of "ab" is carried out; and finally, after
pressing "backspace" sufficiently long, backtracking is done
until finally the search-string gets empty again, and one
arrives back at the cursor position on which the search was started
first.

I would find it great if it were possible to incorporate
such an refined Find-feature. But it is just an idea for
something I find very useful, and I'm definitely aware that
you might see that differently.

Thanks for all of your work already at JLE, which I use as
a standard tool since around the beginning of this year.

Kind greetings to you all, best wishes,
Clemens.

[stefan]

Good point. The current behavior is a bit annoying when correcting the search string.
I'm just asking myself how JLE should behave when you entered a search term "abc", jumped to the 5th occurrence of the string using F3, and then removed the last character from the search string. In this case should the editor also start its search from the beginning (cursor position)? Hm, I would say yes, because removing a character from the search indicates that the user wants to correct its search, and therefore the current search is not of interest anymore.

On the other hand, the intension when adding a character to the search is different I think, because adding means just refining. Therefore, I will only adapt the behavior for removing letters, unless you have another option about that. (I'm open for discussions).