find next?

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> On Feb 11, 2021, at 5:28 PM, David Pesetsky <pesetsk at mit.edu> wrote:
> 
> My Macintosh-educated fingers are used to ⌘-G for "find next" (used after using ⌘-F for "find").  Does Lyx have a "find next" function so I can duplicate this? 
> 
> I may be missing something in plain view, in which case, my apologies for wasting everyone's time — but I'm not finding it.
> 
> -David

This has been a problem for many years. There is a long-standing ticket by me to bring search into Mac-compliance. For Mac fingers the LyX situation is extremely awkward. Here’s the Mac process:

**First Way**
open find dialog with Command-F
type or paste search string
close file dialog or bring focus to main window
hit Command-G to search forward or Shift-Command-G to search backward.

**Second Way**
open find dialog with Command-F
type or paste search string
Hit Next or Previous button
[LyX does not have Next and Previous but rather forces you to do additional clicking in the dialog to change direction.]

**Third Way**
[This is the “modern” way in many apps which does not raise a separate dialog box but rather opens a very small non-overlapping pane in the document window.]
open find dialog with Command-F
type or paste search string
hit Command-G to search forward or Shift-Command-G to search backward.

**Fourth Way**
[This does not require you to even open a dialog box if the search string can be highlighted in the main window.]
select search string in main window
hit Command-E. This enters the selected text into the search buffer.
hit Command-G to search forward or Shift-Command-G to search backward.

Fourth Way is probably the most common. Notice that you don’t even open a search window.


There are other problems in LyX searching.

1. The Find dialog box does not remember its location between uses. I’m sure this is a regression going back a number of years.

2. The “found” result can be _hidden_behind_ the Find dialog. Lots of luck finding it.

3. LyX is unaware of the system clipboard. In normal Mac apps, you can hit Command-E in one app, then switch to another app and the search string is ready to be used for finding in the second app without further user effort. This includes immediate use of Command-G and Shift-Command-G.

Jerry