[find-and-replace] Ability to show results in a dock panel

[savetheclocktower]

Have you checked for existing feature requests?

• [x] Completed

Summary

Whenever the user does a project-wide search, a pane item is opened in the center of the workspace.

Ideally, Pulsar would be able to read my mind and know whether to

• open results in the active pane
• split the active pane to the left or right to open results
• use whichever split already exists and choose the opposite pane of the one that was most recently active

but it can't read minds.

Then, once I click on results, I probably have a particular behavior in mind about how those results should be opened, but Pulsar can't read my mind here either. It usually does what I have in mind — open results in the opposite pane from the search results list — but not always.

One option that should at least be available to users would be to show results in a dock panel instead of a pane item, much the way VS Code does. This is awkward for different reasons, but offers some upsides.

What benefits does this feature provide?

• Easier to keep the results visible alongside the buffers you're opening
• Easy to drag to the left or the right and to remember the last dock used

On the other hand:

• Awkward to have the find/replace fields in the bottom dock and the results in the left/right dock
• Less room to show context (even with a smaller font size)

Any alternatives?

Instead of having this be an option that users have to toggle on, we could just make the pane item itself more flexible so that a user can choose to drag it into a dock. I think I experimented with this on pulsar-find-references and found it somewhat tricky to make it adapt to the narrower container, but I could use some practice with responsive design techniques in CSS.

Other examples:

VS Code is the obvious comparison. I've never really liked how minimalist and tiny their find-and-replace UI is, but the upside is that they manage to fit it all in one sidebar.