Another Way To Close the FIND Dialog?

[Daniel]

On 12/5/21 8:00, Jürgen Spitzmüller wrote:
> Am Mittwoch, dem 12.05.2021 um 01:33 -0400 schrieb Richard Kimberly
> Heck:
>> Very busy of late...will get back to LyX once the summer semester
>> (COVID-related) settles down a bit. For now....
> 
> I am with you. Pretty much the same here.
> 
>> How hard would it be to make Ctrl-F close the find dialog if one is
>> in it? This feels very natural to me.
> 
> I had this initially, but some people were pretty annoyed by it, so I
> removed it (in favor of Esc). The argument was that Ctrl-F should
> always effect in the cursor being in the find dialog, also if people do
> not watch the screen and do not know whether the dialog is already open
> or not.
> 
> Jürgen

Yes, I reacted to the Ctrl-F close behaviour because it confused my 
search routine even more than before. In other applications I often do 
rapid searches without even looking once at the search dialog. This is 
made possible because Ctrl-F always opens (or keeps open) the search 
dialog and selects the whole text in the search field. This is a quite 
universal feature of search dialogs/bars and I always get issues in LyX 
because it does not behave that way. So, all I have to do in other apps is:

1) Ctrl-F
2) Type search word
3) Press Enter
4) Repeat

Use case: Sometimes I am not sure how to find the passage I am looking 
for, so I am quickly trying different search words. Most of the time I 
am much quicker in writing a search word from scratch than editing an 
already existing one.

I am not sure whether the search dialog has the typical select-all 
feature in devel yet. Also, I remember Riki being opposed to it as well 
at some point. But that is some time ago, so maybe positions have 
changed or weakened, so I'll provide a quick summary:

If I remember correctly, Riki's reason was that by select-all one looses 
the cursor position in order to edit the search word. But I think that 
is unlikely to be an issue in most cases because it seems to me that

(1) wanting to change a search word at the exact cursor position is 
unlikely the case, so one will have to look at the search dialog anyway 
to navigate the cursor position with the arrow keys;

(2) the cursor will most often be at the end of the search word anyway 
(because the search word has just been entered) and the cursor position 
can easily be recovered in this case by pressing the right arrow key 
(which is much easier than pressing the select all key combination).

Of course, I still see that there is a cost with the standard behaviour. 
But I think it is a net benefit for most. Also but not only because it 
is standard behaviour.
-- 
Daniel