Open Bug 91520 Opened 23 years ago Updated 1 year ago

Find should default to wrap around == true

Categories

(Toolkit :: Find Toolbar, enhancement, P5)

Product:
Toolkit
Component:
Find Toolbar
Type:
enhancement

Tracking

()

Milestone:
Future

People

(Reporter: levon, Unassigned)

References

Details

(Whiteboard: [RFE][find]) 

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.2+) Gecko/20010713
BuildID:    2001071308

Find dialog should default to enabling wrap-around (perhaps if 
mozilla converts an ns4 profile only ?). I keep on forgetting to
turn this on.

Alternatively, the find settings should be saved with my prefs.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.control-f


Actual Results:  wrap around not on by default

Expected Results:  wrap around should be on
-->sfraser (dup?)
Assignee: mpt → sfraser
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Component: User Interface Design → Editor
Ever confirmed: true
OS: Linux → All
Hardware: PC → All
according to whom and which army?
timeless: principle of least surprise ?

If I'm on a page and search, currently when I reach the end of the page
control-f becomes *useless* until I move over to the mouse, select
wrap-around, then I can search again to reach other parts of the page.

Are you really claiming this is a good thing ?

I would be happy with wrap-around being saved in prefs at the very least.
sorry, i don't think I buy that principle nor do I believe that your suggestion 
would be the least surprising.

What should happen is that when we reach the end of the document, the user is 
informed that no other matches were found, triggering find [again] would start 
searching from the top of the document.

I find it very annoying when I want to find say the last instance of a string, 
or the number of instances of a string and the app i'm using decides it knows 
better than me so it just wraps around.

Saving search options would be fine w/ me. but before we continue w/ this i'd 
appreciate it if you posted something to npm.ui and sought comments.
I agree that it should default to on.  timeless, I would guess that most users
opening the find dialog aren't trying to count the number of instances of a
string (why?) or find the last instance of a string (why?).  Rather, I think
most just want to find the string -- they don't care where on the page it is in
relation to the invisible caret they probably don't even know about.

Or we could offer to start again from the beginning once the user reaches the end...
how about this:
  default to on but it's state is stored/restored every time dialog is closed/
opened

Just an FYI, until find performance is worked on, wrap=true will be slower than 
wrap=false, especially for large documents.
If the search is about to wrap, from an accessibility standpoint it would be
helpful to have a dialog box pop up to let the user know.
moving to future
Priority: -- → P5
Whiteboard: [RFE][find]
Target Milestone: --- → Future
I don't think "don't wrap around" should even be an option.  I don't see why 
anyone would want the find feature to stop working the after last instance of 
the word has been found, especially since they've already seen an "end of 
document" message or dialog.

Timeless: if you want to find the last instance of a word in a page, just type 
the text in and hit "Previous" or Ctrl+Shift+G or Shift+Enter.  Hitting Ctrl+G 
until it stops is not an efficient way to find the last instance of the word.
ok, so how do i count the number of instances?
timeless: the same way you do now.  Count how many times you hit "Find"/"Next" 
before getting an "end of document" message.
Blocks: 106961
Depends on: 100631
timeless: a much more efficient way to count the number of instances is to use
the "highlight" or "highlight regexp" bookmarklet from
http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/pagedata.html.  It puts the number of
instances in the status bar when it finishes.

Again, I think the option to *not* wrap around should be removed once bug 100631
is fixed.
*** Bug 127921 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I think that the discussion near the end of bug 87037 is a better solution to
this.  Basically, if there's text highlighted start searching from there,
otherwise start from the top.
remove self
I would much prefer the suggestion made in comment 6, even if the default is
reset on each session.
duplicate of #156519 (or other way around?)??

It just seems dumb to say that text wasn't found when it is in fact on the page.
 Definitely remember the setting if the user changes it, but honestly, it would
make a lot more sense to make wrap the default.  thanks for listening.
*** Bug 156519 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I'm all for making wrap around default. Actually I'm even all for removing the
option completely and always wrap around as I can't remember to ever have been
glad that wrap around was disabled. Can someone name me a task where not having
wrap around is a big advantage? Maybe I'm overlooking something important here.
I'd like to repeat/re-suggest that the minimal change to make for this bug would
be to remember the setting for Wrap across launches (not just within this
session). It's really annoying to have to re-select the checkbox every time I
use Find.
is this bug fixed or just forgotten?
Neil: probably neither.  It's just not as important as other bugs for this
particular engineer to work on.  I'd guess that the fix is trivial (changing
all.js or similar?) and that a patch would be acceptable/welcome.
By all means, please do remember the setting of the 'wrap around' option. If
this would upset some people, one could imagine an extra option to control
whether or not the 'wrap around' option should be 'sticky'.
Regardless of how the question of the default is decided, it is clearly
anomalous that there is no pref for this.  Could that be a short-term solution?
 This would relieve a lot of annoyance for me.
The real solution is for it to start where the cursor is, go from there to the
end of the page, then go from the top to where the cursor was, then stop.

If that is not done, then the user should be able to choose their own default. 
I would like wrap set to "off".  I hate cycling through the page 3 times before
I notice I am seeing the same instances over and over again.  It is a waste of
time, and so is unchecking the stupid box every single time.  Just make it an
option in preferences.

But I hate the automatically checking the "Wrap" box option with a freaking
passion.  Please institute a fix.

Thank you.
How about a visual and auditory queue when a wrap happens or the full doc has
been searched?
(In reply to comment #27)
> How about a visual and auditory queue when ... the full doc has
> been searched?

That would be sufficient.  Just as long as I am not going in circles.

Thanks.
I downloaded mozilla 1.8a2 just to see if this had been fixed.

I use the vi or vim (www.vim.org) editor under Mac OSX, Sun and Linux systems. 
When on a windows box I search for cgiwin so I can use vi
that way.  Although it is quite old, vi is a very efficient text
editor once you get used to it - it was invented at Bell Labs along
with Unix (the most powerful operating system around).  It beats the
stupid text edit with mousing that every body is using in guis!

That's not to get into OS or text editor wars!  It's just that the
search feature in vi wraps.  That is very convenient.  One just has to
pay a little attention to where one is in the document.  In vi one
could turn on line numbers.  For searches on a page with mozilla, just
watch the document position bar on the right.

The problem with STOPPING is that it slows one down from 100 miles per
hour to a crawl as one has to go to the mouse and futz around to kill
the dang pop up restart the search.

So my preference is for the search to default to wrap.  

While wrap default would a tiny bit slower, I doubt that anyone can
notice the few microseconds difference.

Since some people like pop ups wasting their time, this can be adefault setting
in preferences.  (However, in general principle, there 
NEVER should be popups - a flag should go up that shows the condition
has happened, but it should NEVER get in the way of the user!  Any
popup that does that is wasting the time of millions of people.)

So let's get this thing into the preferences and default to wrap on!
QA Contact: zach → editor
(In reply to comment #19)

> *** Bug 156519 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

In that case, could someone, please, change the prodict and component to something more generic? Bug #156519 is filed against Core/Search, but we've currently got Editor/Trunk instead.

Sorry, meant to say:

   ... but we've currently got Core/Editor instead.

My point is: If the bug is not specific to the editor only, then, please, say so. :-)

I also would like it to wrap by default in my browser (currently using SeaMonkey 1.1.11), whether or not it is set to wrap on installation or whether I have to set it to be so. From a user standpoint, I would be satisfied with any of these alternative solutions:

- Browser always remembers last used setting (which actually appears to be the case for SM1.1.11, at least within a session...can't leave session without losing this entry though)
- Browser always defaults to on
- Browser's default is wrap off, and User must set an obscure setting/workaround in about:config for Browser to default to wrap on.

Of course the bug is trivial, but I think it would be useful for the browser to default to wrap, for the following hypothetical case:

1. Page contains one instance of text "XYZ" in first half of page
2. User unknowingly clicks in (vertical) middle of page
3. User searches for text "XYZ"
4. Browser says no matches are found

In this case, the user may be led to believe that the whole page does not contain the text "XYZ", when in fact the "not found" message only pertains to the portion of the page between the last cursor click and the end of the page.
Assignee: sfraser_bugs → nobody
Severity: normal → S3
Component: DOM: Editor → Find Toolbar
Product: Core → Toolkit
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