Seeking good examples of Find and Replace user interfaces in text editors and IDEs

Question

I'm working on a Windows application with an integrated text editor, like an IDE. The current Find and Replace features use the standard Windows dialogs, which are showing their age and aren't very powerful.

What great examples do you know of Find and Replace functionality, in text editors or IDEs? I'm looking for inspiration for look and feel, ease of use, powerful functionality, the whole works. Thanks!

Note: I'm certainly interested in super-powerful edit-your-whole-workspace-at-once IDE features, but I'm also interested in simple but elegant UI's like Firefox's Find bar, or Chrome's find tab.

Edit: I've accepted Richard's post because it talked about several different kinds of Find and Replace UI, but all the answers were very helpful - thanks!

Answer 1

Look at the one eclipse has. It can find and replace interactivly across the whole workspace

Answer 2

Netbeans has a great project/multiple project one, it saved me on many an occasion.

http://www.netbeans.org/

Answer 3

Find in Visual Studio includes many options:

• Quick find from tool bar (or control-D).
• Incremental search
• Dockable dialogue with options to find across current file, all open files, current project or whole workspace.
• Plain text, whole word and regex support
• Find in files, with named (user definable) sets of folders.

User documentation is here.

Answer 4

An important thing about Find and Replace is being able to see with one view, that what source text will be replaced and what will be the result, before actually changing any files (and even after changing, allow undo). I don't know whether any editor does that right, but to get an idea of what I'm saying, look at how IntelliJ IDEA's Find Usages (Alt+F7) works (it shows a code snippet of what it finds, and shows them all on one page) and combine that with how IDEA's Version Control History shows what has changed on each line (highlighting the exact words that were added/changed/removed, not the whole line).

P.S. Don't create the same kind of firefox-style-find-bar as IDEA has right now, unless you understand all the issues involved. The current find bar was added in IDEA 7 and it has some usability issues related to keyboard control. There were many people, including me, who wanted the old find from IDEA 6 back: http://www.jetbrains.net/devnet/thread/269343 http://www.jetbrains.net/jira/browse/IDEADEV-22804

(Maybe some day I'll create my own IDE, for which I can design the "perfect" user interface. :)

Answer 5

The best one I've used is the utility Flexible Renamer. It is simple to use, supports regular expressions and previews exactly what it will change before you commit.

Another one that works well is Ultra Edit. I like that you can look in all open files or all in a path, mask out filenames to search and use regular expressions on find string and replace string. Pressing the help button in the dialog box brings you right to the page with the regex syntax.

I often use UltraEdit to make changes on a .Net project as it's simpler to use and more reliable than VS. I hate using find/replace in Visual Studio . I also like that you can have the searches directed to an edit window where it appends each new search so you can see all previous ones.

http://flexible-renamer.en.softonic.com/

http://www.ultraedit.com/

Answer 6

Coda has a totally awesome "revolutionary" find and replace engine, that:

Revolutionary Find/Replace. Sure, we've got regular ol' Grep. But we also provide a Grep wrapped with drag and drop simplicity — a Coda first. Want to swap the width and height tags? It’s as simple as searching for width=“x” height=“y” and replacing it with width=“y” height=“x”. That’s it: Coda does the rest.

Answer 7

The best "Find and Replace" I have used is from FrontPage 2003 and SharePoint Designer 2007. Simple implementation, and I love the "Replace Action" and "HTML Rules...", which I use often. Supports regular expressions also, but I use rarely.