eclipse-archived
scoped searching
Currently we have very little support for limiting searching:
- In Ceylon Search, I can limit the scope to 'Selected resources', 'Enclosing projects', or to a list of working sets, and I can choose to completely ignore source archives.
- 'Find ...' searches are global, but the 'Quick Find References' popup limits the search to current project sources.
This is all pretty reasonable when projects are small. We're starting to get some bigger Ceylon workspaces now, and I think we're going to need some enhancements to this. But I don't want to reproduce the awful nested menu structure for the 'Search' menu in JDT. So I'm not sure how we could present the options in the UI. Anyway, I think we should have some way to:
- Configure filtering for searches, via the preferences. I suppose it makes sense to just use the global filters, but perhaps we should allow customization of this.
- Limit a 'Find ...' search to 'Selected resources', 'Enclosing projects', or to a list of working sets. I have no clue how we could present this in the UI.
- Limit a 'Find ...' search to ignore source archives. Likewise, I have no clue how we could present this in the UI.
Any thoughts?
Another nice feature of Eclipse, which I've never used, since I never really knew about it, is ⇧⌘U which does a search for references in the current file only, and displays the results in the search results list.
I think it definitely makes sense to have a feature like that, say, Find in File or Find in Selection which:
- does a search within the current editor, or
- within the selected resources
and bind it to ⇧⌘U F or perhaps ⇧⌘U U (we already have several other search actions bound to ⇧⌘U X).
I guess that this would go quote a long way toward alleviating the need for all the different variations proposed above, since you can freely select the things you want to consider in the Ceylon Explorer.