Sublime Forum

Shrinking FIND Text Field

#1

on macOS — when the sublime window is narrower than 85 characters — the FIND edit field is shrunk to only 1 character wide — i need to make the sublime text window at least 102 characters wide in order to have a FIND edit field that will enable viewing at least 10 characters in it — this is the case even while the the ‘Find’, ‘Find Prev’ and ‘Find All’ buttons retain their full width, and the .* and Aa and “” and wrap icons retain their full width.

this seems absolutely backwards to me — the most important thing, your FIND query itself is shrunk to 1 character, while the window decorations and icons consume all available window width in the find bar — this is crazy — since find functionality is a high frequency issue — and the FIND TEXT is the most important thing — not the extra little buttons and window decoration.

Improvement here is simple:

  1. FIND EDIT FIELD SHOULD NOT SHRINK — shrink the icons, shrink the buttons, but do not shrink the edit field where you are typing the FIND query.

  2. the order of the FIND toolbar is currently: 6 Icons, 1 Shrinking Edit Field, 3 Buttons

ordering should be: 1 Non-shrinking Edit Field, 3 Buttons, 6 Icons (ideally merged into a tiny popup menu).

is there any way to fix this bad FIND edit field behaviour?

john p

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#2

Using a state of the art FullHD/4k screen?

Jokes besides: At any point there’s always not enough room to display all information.

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#3

There’s not enough room to display all information — yet the problem could be easily solved by displaying the actual text the user is trying to find — and NOT a lot of unsued buttons. :man_shrugging:t3:

this is because the order of the FIND toolbar is currently: 6 Icons, 1 Shrinking Edit Field, 3 Buttons

there would be no issue if the ordering were: 1 Non-shrinking Edit Field, 3 Buttons, 6 Icons.

does no one care about usability? — as long as it is possible, who cares?
why oh why — when almost everything else is so good. :roll_eyes:

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#4

I don’t think many people have your use case of needing to use the find field with such a narrow window.

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