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I request that users be able to search for user-visible strings (i.e. strings that appear in the GUI, stdout, or stderr). Why? I did a user study where I watched seven professional programmers closely while they did four 20-min Java programming tasks. If you throw out one programmer who had very very very little experience, ten of the eleven File Searches that they did were for user-visible strings. The subjects frequently had to think for a minute as to what string they would search for -- it needed to be something in the GUI "near" what they were after, but not so common that it would show up all over the code base. (Finding where the GUI string "new" is set is difficult!) Implementing this feature request would be difficult, no question: you'd have to do something similar to a live/dead analysis to figure out where strings propagated to, and you wouldn't be able to trace where user-generated or database-generated strings. It also wouldn't be helpful to people who work on "well-behaved" projects that have all their user-visible strings separated into a single file. Thus this probably should be a third-party plug-in, not part of the core code. (Why am I posting it here, then? Because I think the idea is worth capturing, and I don't know where else to capture it.)
