Highlighting of search expression matches (immediate)

[greggman]

Real time search.

You guys have the Regular Expression evaluator but Sublime just does this right in the editor. You pick search, you have regular expressions on, it starts highlighting the matches. It makes a lot of sense. No Need for 2 UIs. If you want to try on some sample data just make a new file. Otherwise, it's far more common that I want to search for something in the current document using an regular expression.

I know you guys have incremental search but that takes you to the first match as you type. It doesn't show all the matches visible on the screen in the current document.

[rgloden]

It is really helpful in the Find dialogue with Incremental search selected you can experiment with regular expressions until you find the right expression.

As far as I can tell, there is no way to visually preview the search expression (as you type) in the Replace tab so I have to go back to the Find tab, experiment to get the regex expression correct, and the go back to the Replace tab.  If would be nice if there if were possible to have the equivalent of the Incremental search in the Replace tab.

[Tim Kemp]

@rgloden, you can also paste a chunk of text into the Regex Evaluator to interactively preview what a regex will match.

[rgloden]

@Tim ... yes I use the Regex Evaluator for the really realy hard Regex's ... but that sure kills the work flow if you use somewhat complex RegEx expressions frequently but don't need the power of the Regex Evaluator tool.

Its not a big deal to switch back to Find ... get the Regex right ... and then switch back to Replace ... just saying "it would be nice if ..."

[Clark]

v21 will have this (sort of). By default, the v21 gui_find command will display a smaller find/replace/multi-file find dialog a bit like what's in Visual Studio. When doing a replace it will do what you want and do the search. In CUA emulation, Ctrl+F will display this smaller dialog. Pressing Ctrl+F again will give you the big tool window. I suspect it will do the same for other bindings. Of course, you will be able to configure this to just go straight to the big tool window if you want.