Pressing Cmd-F overwrites find text even if nothing is selected.

[edmundmk]

• VSCode Version: 1.4.0
• OS Version: OSX 10.11.6

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Enter some find text.
2. Press enter.
3. Edit the text in the document.
4. Press Cmd-F to repeat the search.
5. Notice that the text in the find box has been replaced with the word the cursor is over.

This is really annoying when doing repeated find-edit cycles.

[ramamurthynagaraj]

Hi guys, created a PR for this issue. Let me know if there are any issues.

[alexdima]

@edmundmk Rather than jumping and changing the seeding behaviour of ctrl+f, I am wondering if in step 4 for you , f3 would be a more suitable shortcut. If you want to repeat the search, f3 will take you to the next search hit without even losing focus in the editor.

[alexdima]

@edmundmk Here I am using F3. Is this the sort of thing you are trying to do?

[ramamurthynagaraj]

@alexandrudima I was taking sublime as a reference. The seeding doesn't happen even with the first cmd+f. Both vscode and sublime has cmd+d to seed the current focused word, which can suit your fav #10969 (comment) use case.

I think find next/previous shortcut should suffice @edmundmk use case.
I personally use cmd+f to bring the focus to find widget to make further refinements in the find text. Any thoughts on this?

[alexdima]

@ramamurthynagaraj That is a fair point. Maybe we can change the behaviour to the following:

Seed the search string on ctrl+f if:

• the search string is empty (what you have in PR Fixes #10386, preventing start find action overwriting find input text #10969)
• [or] if the editor has selected text which is not a find match.

The rationale:

• if the editor has no selected text (collapsed cursor) then the search text does not get overwritten
• if the editor has selected text:
  • it could be that the find widget selected that text (imagine searching for \w+ in regex mode). If the selection is a find match, then the contents of the selection should not be used to seed the search text
  • otherwise, it is very likely that the selection was "manually"/"intentionally" created and is a good indicator that it can be used to seed the search text.

[ramamurthynagaraj]

@alexandrudima I think your proposed behaviour is better.
Let me see if I could implement the second point.

[ramamurthynagaraj]

@alexandrudima Created a new PR incorporating your suggestion. Please let me know if there are any issues.
Also was trying to add tests at findController.test.ts. It doesn't seem to be running with ./scripts/test.sh. How do we run those tests?

[rebornix]

Dup of #20768 and we already added an option for seedSearchStringFromSelection.