[cdt-dev] Enhancement for CDT search dialog

[Christoph Anton Mitterer <calestyo@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi.

I hope that's not off topic, if so please apologize ;-)

I've been using jEdit as my favourite programming editor for years now, but 
finally I'd like to switch to Eclipse. But there are some features that I miss 
in Eclipse that jEdit has:
- rectangular selection in the Editor
- that features that jEdit's "whitespace"-plugin has
- a general indenting algorithm (not sure if this has been implemented in 
Eclipse or at least for CDT in the meantime)

But the most important is, the in my opinion, superior search dialog of jEdit.
As far as I can see, Eclipse in combination with CDT comes with two search 
functions, the standard Eclipse search (per default via  Ctrl-F) and the C/C++ 
search (per default via Ctrl+H).


What I like about the C/C++ search (which apparently comes from CDT) ist the 
possibilty to search for symbols (like classes or variables, etc.) which the 
standard Eclipse search cannot.

But the first bad thing is, that the dialogs for both are pretty different. I'd 
suggest that there should be done some effort to make them more similar (of 
course this is not fully possible as the C/C++ language search provides more 
options as the standard search).

Anyway there is one feature that all searches in Eclipse lack. It's what jEdit 
calls "hypersearch".
It's just a small feature but in my opinion - and what I've seen from may 
websites, forums etc. - and from many others it's extremely useful for programing.

Currently, when using C/C++ search, there is a node for each file in which 
results are found (in the Search view) and a subnote, with the number of matches.
To do about the same what jEdit's hyper search does would require the following:
Add more subnodes, where each subnode is exactly one found result (per file).
The subnode should contain something like "linenumber: linecontents".
When you click on a subnode, the editor should jump to the line. The context 
menu should allow to remove subnodes (of course only from the search result but 
not the line from the code).


Why is this function so useful:
Well it gives a much better overview of the search results. You cannot only see 
how many results were found but (in a list) where they were found (throught the 
line numbers) and what the places in the code contain (the line contents).
This is usefule because very often the line contents give the programmer an idea 
about what happens there, and so he can decide wheter it is the right line or 
not (without having to actually go to the line and read it "manually").

The main advantage of the ability to remove subnodes is: If you have some 
modifications to make, or some checks to perform on all lines that contain the 
searched string, it is handy to check which result-lines you already processed 
(by removing it from the search results).

As you can see, this is only a very little feature and not a difficult request 
like: Please provide GTK+/Glade for Visual Editor ^^
But I think that it's worth enough to be included in CDT's C/C++ search, and if 
possible you might try to even bring the people responsible for the standard 
search of Eclipse and perhaps even those responsible for other language-searches 
to add this feature too.

There's alread a bug report in Eclipse bugzilla and I've already voted for 
it,... but the report is some years old and I don't thing anything will happen 
via the bugzilla issue. So I've decided to try to request inclusing in CDT as a 
first step :-)

Best wishes,
Chris.

btw: Can anyone tell me when CDT will be fully included in the Eclipse core (or 
whatever they call it)? I think it's pretty much discriminating that the Java 
Development Plugins are part of it and CDT not.

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