Use a secondary color for search highlights.

When searched with CMD+F, highlighted search results are not case-sensitive, which is totally fine.

But, I think it would be a good idea to highlight the individual characters with another color to show user that they are only matched because case-sensitivity is ignored.

As an example: Search for /ImageVault/publishedmedia/ in iterm.

/imageVault/publishedmedia/ string is matched in the latests iterm version.

My suggestion is, keep the above string highlighted but change the highlight color of i character to a secondary color so that user sees that they are not actually exactly same.

Do you guys think it is a good idea?

There really should be a smart case mode, where if the query has a capital letter then it's case insensitive. Would that address the issue? I think different highlight colors wouldn't look so good.

Milestone changed to %Feature Complete 3.1

Thanks for discussing this George!

I can see 2 small issues with smart case approach, correct me if I am wrong.

1 - Smart case mode will be activated only if the query has capital letter(s), but not if matched results have capital letters.

2 - If smart case mode is activated, other results will be ignored and iterm will only show the case-sensitive results and we don't know if it is the desired outcome for all iterm users.

I really like how search is working in iterm today. With secondary color approach, we are not actually changing functionality so there will be no surprises for long-term iterm users. We only add little more power to the search results. I thought the color change would be the easiest way to get users attention to those characters but this can be solved with other approaches like underline the character or something similar.

PS: by color change, I don't mean the whole matched text, only the character that breaks the match if it were case-sensitive.

What do you think?

Smart case mode would only be dependent on the query. If the query is all lowercase it is a case-insensitive search.

You can select whether you want a case-sensitive search by clicking the magnifying glass icon in the find window.

Fixed in e88f5f43

closed