One opens a file for viewing with F3. Then there are two internal search methods. One can hit either F7 or / and open a window in which to type something to search for. Call it "string" for convenience in what follows.
After this, what _used_ to happen, to the best of my memory, is that the search function looks for the _next_ occurrence of "string" which occurs _after_ the point where you are in the file. I mean exactly that what I am pretty sure used to happen is that, if I open the file and scroll halfway through it, then at that point open a search for "string" then the search would take me to the next occurrence of "string" which sits in the file after the point where I am (which with F3 was taken to be after the top of whatever is visible in the terminal window). What seems to happen for me now is that, if I scroll halfway through the file and search at that point for "string" then the search function thinks it is more clever than I am, and what I really wanted to do was to go back to the beginning of the file, if, say, "string" was to be found on line 3. And then if "string" was found, say, 257 times before I got to the point in the file to which I had scrolled by hand, then I have to search 257 times for "string" in order to get to the point in the file at which I wanted to start the search in the first place. Be assured that the previous functionality was very useful, and I wish I had it back. Was this change the result of a conscious design decision? If so, I would like to submit my vote on the matter, as a user. You see, if I want to search for "string" from the beginning of the file, I can assuredly scroll to the beginning of the file and start there, so that is not hard at all. But if by conscious intent (and for reasons which seem to make a lot of sense to me) I start a search somewhere in the middle of a file, I really really really do not want to be forced to go back to the first occurrence of "string" near the top of the file. If you want to know what set me off, I am looking at a log file which dumped out the transactions from a USB device. The length of said file is 709782 bytes -- not even a large file considering what it is. I scrolled down to a place where the device starts to download a bunch of data. Intending to go to the end of that data block to see what happens next, I searched for "transfer" which is found in the file every time there is a new URB. I point out that this is a perfectly logical and natural thing to want to do. In the event, I was forcibly reminded of an inconvenience which I have been suffering since the last time I upgraded mc, for, what I just tried to do I used to do routinely and it used to work perfectly well. If this is a problem which can be resolved by a configuration issue, then someone please be so kind as to let me know how to do that. Otherwise, if this is an internal change and I cannot fix it without editing C code and recompiling, I earnestly hope that it will be put back the way it was. Theodore Kilgore _______________________________________________ Mc mailing list http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc
