The Edit->Find menu entry pops up a search dialog box, as seen in many other GUI application. This is an excellent idea, and maybe the dialog works perfectly under some OS/window system combinations, but for me it is almost completely broken. (See below for a detailed description.) "Find" is a pretty basic editor feature; if the existing menu entry cannot be fixed before the release, could we remove the menu entry or have it invoke a simple minibuffer-based search? The current state of affairs is IMHO quite an embarrassment. Problem: It looks horribly and works worse. :-( For one, the "Search" and "Search for:" labels do not honor the foreground color of the default face, which makes them look horribly ugly on dark background. Second, all the buttons quickly flash several thousands of times (for several seconds) after the dialog box appears. During the flashing XEmacs is unusable. The flashing repeats whenever I move or resize the dialog box window. The search area is smaller than it needs to be to show the font that is used for input. The same problem plagues some of the buttons. In some cases, I cannot focus to the search area, so the whole thing is useless. When I can, pressing Enter apparently does not do anything. I have to press the "Find Next". Likewise, the customary Escape key fails to close the dialog box. When I resize the dialog using my window manager (useful for large search strings, different fonts, etc.), even worse things start happening: the text of the current buffer starts appearing below the dialog, and you can actually input text in it! It looks like the dialog is implemented as the "gutter" of an XEmacs frame. Even worse, once XEmacs text shows up, it is impossible to focus on the input entry; all input events go to the XEmacs buffer. Attached image demonstrates that. I really don't mean this as a personal attack and I implore not to be understood that way. I would just like us to rethink whether we want to advertise this particular feature under X before it is cleaned up. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ find-shot.png Content-Type: image/png Content-Encoding: base64

Hi Ben, At 11:57 PM 3/26/01 -0700, Ben Wing wrote: >i agree with you actually, for 21.4. > >even under windows, there are problems, specifically with focus. > >andy, i really appreciate all the widget work you've done, but >unfortunately it's at the dreaded 80% stage, and not really ready for >prime-time. i know that you're Please could you be less sweeping in your judgements. I use the buffer tabs and the progress bar all the time with no problems at all. However, I agree that using the widgets for dialog boxes is only part of the way there. >very busy and probably won't have time to work on this for awhile, if ever >-- so You never know. I now have a really fast internet connection and do a normal job rather than travelling the whole time.I also plan to get a laptop which would give me some hacking time on BART. >what would really help is if you could spend some time and document in as >much detail as you can exactly how the widget code works. this is really >important because it's pretty much the only way that other maintainers are >going to be able to fix up the problems in your code. I have started this (there is some new stuff committed). But again the time I don't have - I don't have for this either. When I get some time - and 21.4 is released - I will make this a priority. Until then I will focus what little time I have on bug fixing.

andy

>>>> "Andy" == Andy Piper <andyp(a)bea.com&gt; writes:

> the problems, but i'm stymied so far without some docs.