gedit search function is not practical anymore

[vollmanr]

i use gedit a lot, and i find it comfortable in general.

the new small search window is extremely impractical. FOCUS PROBLEM:
CTRL+F > type a search (search of longer strings FAR TOO SLOW) > find
and now, typing ESC brings one back to the former place!
when trying to use CTRL-F again, the search string is replaced by new text.

if one wants to stay in the found passage, one must use the mouse/touchpad to click into the text.

this is an extremely annoying feature/behavior.

i simply would like to have the old search window + its behavior back.
i am working very quickly and mostly using shortcuts.
gedit now completely interrupts my way of working.

additionally, where are the other search functions such as case-sensitive search?

additionally, i do not want the search function to slow down so much. for me it is ok to start the search after i have finished typing my search string :-) this new energy-consuming ZEITGEIST-etc-fashion is not good for quick workers with serious amounts of data.

best wishes, vollmanr

[thinkpad (fellowsgarden)]

related to this https://live.gnome.org/Gedit/FAQ ?

gedit is very slow and/or crashes when opening files with very long lines. Can you fix it?

When designing GtkTextView (the text display widget of gtk+ which gedit uses) the developers had to make a design decision: trading off bad performance and memory use on corner cases like very long lines in exchange for better performance in search operations and full support for UTF-8 text. This is a known limitation of GtkTextView and cannot be fixed. On top of that Pango seems to use a lot of CPU drawing such long lines. This may be fixable, but it isn't easy... Feel free to give it a try. Crashes with long lines are usually due to out-of-memory conditions, but if that's not the case then we would like to know about it.

------------

I think I've suffered from the long-line issue a lot, and have used leafpad (and am about to try geany) as a more reliable alternative; don't get me wrong: if gedit were reliably stable and would not become UNUSABLE for certain documents, I'd have zero complaints about it...

[vollmanr (vollmanr)]

i dont think so.

i find the use of CTRL+F and ESCAPE disturbing.

when i search for something, i would rather like to remain at the found instance, and not jump back to where i was.

additionally, this new automatic search makes the program very slow with longer files.

thank you, v.

[Adam Dingle (adam-yorba)]

As described in the gedit help at https://help.gnome.org/users/gedit/3.8/gedit-search.html.en :

- You can press Enter to cancel a search and retain the current cursor position. (This behavior is admittedly not consistent with other GNOME applications; see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=699658 for a request to change this.)

- Right click the magnifying glass icon or the search text to get to search options (match case, match whole world, wrap around).

I'm marking this bug as invalid because it mentions several different issues, some of which were due to not understanding gedit's current interface. Feel free to open up new bugs for individual specific issues.

[Andre M (amas)]

THIS IS REALLY ANNOYING, the immediatly starting search function stalls the program in long files (e.g. I want to search for "def", it stalls the program (gets greyed out) for a minute)

Please fix this.

[delki8 (delki8)]

THIS IS REALLY ANNOYING!

[Steve Kieu (msh-computing)]

Yes it is really annoying but Ubuntu seems not care about it.

At the time you type it start searching even the first characters. It even does not wait for some milisecs to do the search (just to detect user continue to type text rather than search the whole word. Then it cause cpu crazy hungry and eventually I have to kill it.

The person who marks this to be invalid? I dare to ask a quesiton? Have you bothered to repeat what the reporter here do and see if it is valid or invalid?

SImple. Start gedit - open a pretty large text document (some 200Kb or so) . Then Ctrl + F. Start typing your word to search.

You will see it and perhaps you wont mark it as Invalid.

Hope somebody cares, somebody hear ....

[dmnc (lurid)]

I switched back to gedit2 because this search function is terrible. But I think this is a bad place because it is not a matter of the linux distribution (Ubuntu) but Gnome gedit itself ... so folks, please support "our thing" here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gedit/issues/281

[Jeff Fortin Tam (kiddo)]

While it won't address your UX annoyances, I have filed an issue upstream proposing an approach to make live search faster for big files: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gedit/-/issues/398