Wednesday, September 30, 2009 at 3:30PM Xcode 3.2: The New Find Redesign
Apple, Development, xCode | Niels Hansen One of the things that have driven me bad about Xcode was the Find dialog. I've always felt that the find dialog got in the way and there was no way to dock to the IDE.
Well I was pleasantly surprised to find out that when I starting using Xcode 3.2 and clicked Cmd + F to bring up the find dialog, that it did not pop up the old dialog but instead a docked version of it appeared in the IDE! If you've used Safari, you know what I'm talking about. It now expands above the editor.
Here is a screen shot of my Editor before I did a find.
This is is what it looks like after I did a find:
Now what's cool is that when you enter the word your'e looking for, they are all highlighted and the first one found is highlighted in yellow.
As you can see above, all the matches are highlighted. Now if you want to cycle between all of the found results, you can either click the arrow buttons or CMD + G to find the next result.
Not a huge deal but this new update makes it feel like the rest of the Mac applications in Snow Leopard. I also believe this increases my productivity because I'm not messing with the dialog box, I can instantly see how many results were found!
Reader Comments (2)
"I also believe this increases my productivity because I'm not messing with the dialog box, I can instantly see how many results were found!"
I don't see what that has to do with the elimination of the dialog. They could have added this enhancement anyway.
The inline search terms are a usability regression for a few reasons. First, they waste space by having a search banner in every pane, and you can't move them off to the side.
Second, the search parameters (like case sensitivity, "whole words") are missing. They're hidden under the obscure multi-function textbox, which confounds people at first and then continues to cause problems even after they're told about them. Why? Because when you search again half an hour later and don't get any hits, you don't see that "whole words" is still activated from last time.
While I do like it too, it drives me batty that I can no longer get to a find result without mousing there and clicking it.
I use the keyboard and rarely touch the mouse, and in the old versions I'd bring up the dialog type in the text, hit enter, then apple-w (to close the dialog); apple-g would then let me cycle through all hits and I'd be in the editor ready for typing!