Show "Find" result list?

[ander1122]

I'm so glad you're continuing this important project. As a longtime KN user, I have a request—it's for a feature I've always wished KN had.

When you search for text that exists in multiple places, you have to "Find Next" through all of them till you find the instance you're looking for. In the process, KN opens—and leaves open—each node containing the results you're not looking for. It's a rather slow, old-fashioned way to find stuff.

Most PIMs developed these days use a different approach: They show a list of results, with each result in this format:

[name of this result's node]
indent -> [few words preceding searched string] [searched string (bold) ] [few words following searched string]

You can then click any instances of the found text to jump to it. It's so fast and easy.

Some PIMs do this in the search/find dialog box; some do it on a panel. RightNote and TreeDB Notes use the latter method.

KN already has a Find panel—and I never really understood why, as it just duplicates the Find dialog box. But since it's there anyway, how about using it to show Find results?

Thanks for considering this! Cheers, A.

[ander1122]

BTW, if you did implement this, my preference would be for the Find panel to automatically come to the foreground to show the results (that is, if you used the Find dialog box, rather than the panel, to do the search). Some users might not want their selected panel changed, though—so you could add it as a settings option, e.g.: "Automatically show Find panel after searches". (I'd suggest enabling it by default, as I think most users would want to know about it.)