kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Dick Hollenbeck <dick@...>]

Wayne Stambaugh wrote:
> Dick Hollenbeck wrote:
>
> > Wayne Stambaugh wrote:
> >
> > > I have been working on one of my todo list items of replacing the
> > > EESchema find dialog with an improved wxFormBuilder version and ran into
> > > a few issues with the current search behavior. I wanted to get some
> > > input from the group before I continue plowing ahead on my current
> > > trajectory. The current item search in EESchema uses a wild card
> > > pattern search similar to a typical file name search using * and ?. The
> > > problem with this is if you want to search for the components that are
> > > not annotated (D?, C?, etc.), setting the search string to D? does not
> > > yield the result that I think most users would expect. I'm also not
> > > sure that the average user understands * and ? pattern matching. I
> > > would think most users are more familiar with matching the whole word or
> > > any part of a word options that most find dialogs provide. So I am
> > > proposing the following initial changes the EESchema find dialog:
> > >
> > > 1) Make the dialog modeless and don't dismiss it on every search.
> > nice
> >
> > > 2) Save find dialog position, size, and search settings between sessions.
> > execellent
> >
> > > 3) Use whole/part of word and case sensitive/insensitive search options
> > > instead of * and ?
> > I like * and ?, and if ? is really a single character wildcard, should 
> > it not match a ? ?
> >
> > That last ? is for the question. And that is humorous, according to 
> > me. :)
>
> Your humor not withstanding, yes ? will match ? :) However, using my
> example above if D1-D9 where in the list before the first occurrence of
> D? then you have to search through D1-D9 to get to the first occurrence
> of D?. I could add a check box to enable/disable wild card searching.
> This covers both cases. Maybe a better solution would be to make the
> annotate dialog modeless and add the search capability for unannotated
> components to it. Initially I'll add a check box to the find dialog to
> turn simple wild card searching on and off to see how that works.
You have added more information now about your concerns, and I don't 
want to be inflexible, but I do like wild card searching.

If I can assume that your main concern is with the '?' operator, we 
could simply drop that form of wildcard, and continue to support *.

This * is pretty good wildcard support, and this leaves ? to be 
interpreted literally, which would let you find the unannotated symbols.

Is there a compromise down this path?