Right now I am running MC from the Slackware-current package mc-20100206_git-i486-1, installed on March 2. It would seem by the name to be a fairly recent version, but might not be precisely equivalent to any release version. Some of the things which I describe below might have been recently fixed. But I just had to confront two of the three problems described below for the n-plus-first time since March 2, and I am having a reaction about it.
That said: Three problems now exist with searching, both for files and for content of files, and for years these problems did not exist. Problem 1: The F9 menu gives a "Find file" option. For some reason which eludes my understanding, someone has configured that not merely to search for a file. Oh no, that would be too simple. Nowadays, "Find file" wants to search not only for the file that I name, but to do a search for content, too, at the same time. And the content that it pulls out from somewhere and expects to search for does not have anything to do with any previous use of "Find file" either, because I have never voluntarily wanted to use "Find file" for any such thing. What exactly is the matter with letting someone do a simple search for a file by name, and not trying to make the simple and obvious to be complicated instead? Problem 2: Behavior of content search within a file using "/" or F7 seems to me to have been seriously degraded from what for years used to "just work." Suppose I am searching through a file for the occurrence of a specific word or phrase. I might be curious for example that how many times it occurs in the file, and where it occurs. In fact, I would often consider that to be useful information. Why, oh why is it considered a clever new feature that the search now wraps and starts over again from the top of the file? And without asking me if I want to do that, or warning me that it is going to do that? Particularly when one of the options for the search consists of a box that one can check, to search the file backwards? Does the backwards search wrap, too, but backwards??? There is no visible option to check which can be kept permanent, to restore sanity. And why should one need an option to restore sanity when things could easily have been kept the way they used to be, which worked just fine. I mean, this is a desktop or console file manager and not Firefox, where wrapping a search might be considered a good and clever idea. No, MC is a tool that lots of people use to get work done. This is not even to mention the apparent un-asked-for mixing together of a past content search within a single file somehow into the next use of the "Find file" function (Problem 1). Problem 3: This is not a new one. I have mentioned it before on this list but somehow it has not been fixed. Namely, the two options F7 and "/" in the good old days used to work separately, but now they work together. In the good old days, which lasted for well over a decade, it was possible to open a file for viewing using F3, and then to search the same file for "foo" using F3 and for "bar" using "/". If one would stop and think about it, this might indeed be a useful feature. I for one used to use it on routine basis. Now for several versions of MC this no longer works. If one searches for "foo" using either one of these search commands and then wants to start up the other one and search for "bar" then the first one will quit searching for "foo" and will also search for "bar." This is not an improvement, but is a step backwards, instead. Now, I should say something good because otherwise whoever concocted these new "features" which broke old functionality and ease of use will be upset. So let me say that another thing I found very frustrating did get fixed in the release I am using. Namely, during several recent versions of MC the content search functions F7 and "/" were forgetting what one was searching for if one closed one file and opened another, and one had to fill out the search window all over again. This is fixed, and it works just like it did in the good old days before improvements were attempted on the search functions. Whoever fixed this, thanks. Theodore Kilgore _______________________________________________ mc mailing list http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc