I would like to request a minor change in the way searches work. When I use the search bar in the toolbar, it shows me the documents that contain what I’m searching for, but then I have to use the “Find” feature to show it to me highlighted wherever it is in the document.
Could you combine these two things so when I select a result from the ‘search’ function, it automagically shows me the first instance highlighted in the document? (And presumably loaded in the ‘Find’ subsystem so I can hit F3 to find subsequent matches in the document)
If it’s already supposed to work that way-- it doesn’t, unless there’s something I’m missing.
It used to work that way! I mean, up until yesterday for me. When I did a project search for a word or phrase, it listed the text pieces it was in, and then in each text piece, the word was highlighted in every instance.
And now today, there was only some yellow highlighting of the word I was looking for. The inconsistency is especially bizarre? Some text pieces had one use of the term highlighted; other text pieces had none.
It wouldn’t save you a lot of time. You couldn’t push ⌘F or ⌘G right away, since you wouldn’t have:
a) the cursor in a document or
b) a document selected
Scrivener wouldn’t and probably shouldn’t assume you want the first match selected (and search that) or all the matches selected (maybe opening a scrivenings your computer can’t handle).
There are multiple issues and points of optimisation to cover here:
Quick Search itself, what I think you are referring to as the “search bar in the toolbar”, is designed to be foremost a navigation tool. Jumping to items with it is meant to be identical to clicking on them in the binder. It should be loading the last cursor position. It would be extremely disruptive if you intended to load an item that you were working on five minutes ago, and find your stopping point forever lost because of whatever fragment of text you typed in to get back to the item in general. So for general title and synopsis matches, you absolutely are supposed to Find Next, if what you really wanted was to find the phrase instead of just opening the item.
That said, there is a fallback phrase result list as part of the tool itself. If you select from that part of the result list (rather than the title or synopsis lists), then indeed it should jump you to the first match and preload Find with the typed in term. The latter part of that is working, but not the former.
Project Search should also act like regular clicks in the binder, but at the moment it scrolls you to the first match, which again disrupts workflows where search is being used to locate items, not phrases. This needs to be fixed—but for the moment it’s a way of getting what you’re looking for.
Thank you for the update and the confirmation. Hopefully this will get fixed at some point soon, but it’s not a huge problem. I can get around it easily enough.
