Maybe this is user error but I curse every time I use the Find function.
For example:
I click on a section (chapter in my case) in the Binder to highlight it.
I type command-F
I type the word I’m interested in finding in this chapter. Entire Document is always selected by default.
I hit enter, hoping the search will work. It rarely does. Sorry I can’t reproduce the difference, but the fix is this:
I have to scroll to the very top of the chapter.
I have to click to place my cursor before the first word in the chapter (assuming I want to search from the beginning, which I always do).
Then I can run the Find. This is too many steps. I don’t want to have to click inside the text to activate Find. I also think having “search entire document” should provide automatic wraparound, since the view of the text when first opened goes to the area last edited, not the top. Wraparound only works if I first click to place the cursor.
Am I doing something wrong, or can this be fixed? Thanks.
Hmm, ordinarily you shouldn’t have to do much of anything. You can invoke find even if your focus is in the Binder sidebar, and it will attempt to find the term in the split that has the blue header bar (or if you do not have any splits, just the main editor). Additionally if the word cannot be found from the point where you were last working in the text file, then it will wrap around to the top automatically (displaying a little overlay with a symbol in the middle of the editor briefly). Like I say, that should happen even if you start with the focus technically outside of the editor (i.e. no need to click into it manually), and from that point on your focus will actually be in that editor.
So it sounds like you may be running into a bug that I’ve seen happening (I believe mainly in 10.9+) now and then, but have never been able to pin down the causes of. Some symptoms are not being able to find text at all even though it is clearly in the editor, and not wrapping around when it otherwise should. Does that sound a bit like what you’re experiencing?
Curiouser and curiouser. Apparently there is a difference if the binder is in its slide in-slide out mode, or if it’s fixed on the left side. If I press cmd-F when the focus is on a document in the slide in- slide out binder, it’s all greyed out. If I do the same when the binder is open/fixed I can do a search of the document regardless if focus is on the editor or the binder. (This of course doesn’t address the wrap around issue, that I can’t recreate. If I can do a search, it starts wherever I am in the document, searches to the end and goes on to search from the beginning. As you would expect.)
That might be a limitation in how the slide-out panels work. Cursor focus can be a bit tricky with an element that automatically comes in and out of view like that. But even so you still only should need to click once anywhere in the editor in order to search.