Sublime Forum

Find and Replace Wishlist

#1

I just tried out Sublime for the first time, and it’s really sweet. I like the minimap, I like the color scheme, and I really like how clean it feels.
There’s just a couple things that have been a dealbreaker in pretty much every editor I’ve ever used, and Sublime is really close to doing what I want but not quite there. Specifically, it’d be really nice if:

  • There were a command for “replace” (as in “replace and find next”; as opposed to “showPanel replace”).

  • There were a command to put the current selection into the “Replace with:” half of the replace panel.

  • There were a command to put the current selection into the “Find what:” half of the replace panel without immediately searching for it. Right now I use findUnder, which almost does what I want but not quite.

  • The “showPanel” command didn’t automatically fill the input box with what’s currently selected.

  • The replace panel input boxes could be expanded.
    Right now they accept multiple lines only (so far as I can tell) through the use of findUnder (pasting a multiline clipboard only pastes the last line), which is inconvenient especially in the fact that there’s no way to then replace with a multiline string. So the functionality is there for them to support multiple lines; I’d just like to be able to make the box bigger, to be able to use the up and down arrows to navigate the current content instead of browsing the history, and to be able to paste multiline clipboard contents unchanged.

To make it more clear, my ideal workflow goes something like this (the shortcut keys are not the important part, obviously. As an aside, I really like Sublime’s easy .sublime-keymap format. It makes editing keys way faster than does a GUI):

  • Select a word.

  • Hit ctrl-e to put my selection into the “find” half.

  • Edit what was just selected to change it to what I want.

  • Select that.

  • Hit ctrl-shift-e to put the new word into the “replace” half.

  • Hit ctrl-g to find next.

  • Hit ctrl-r to replace and find next, or ctrl-g to not replace if this one shouldn’t be replaced.

As long as I’m writing a wish-list, I may as well say this: Ideally I’d like to only use the find/replace panel, even when not replacing, but when I hit “Enter” in it, it replaces by default instead of finding by default. If there were a way to change this that’d be awesome.

Thanks!

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How to step through search / replace
#2

+1 for this :smile:

Maybe we can get find.stringReplace
and a find.doReplace, find.doFind (I know we have findAll already…)

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#3

I would second support for multiline find and replace text with expandable text-areas instead of text-boxes.

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#4

[quote]# Hit ctrl-e to put my selection into the “find” half.

Hit ctrl-shift-e to put the new word into the “replace” half.[/quote]

available in latest beta :smile:

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