Regex Find in Page

[zernyu]

Could you include an option to have the Find in Page feature accept regular expressions? That would be awesome, thanks for this extension!

[angelonuffer]

I'm working on it at my fork.

[int3]

This is now implemented in the regex-find branch.

The current UX is a stripped down version of what's available in Pentadactyl (see here for more details) -- essentially the search string is treated as a regex if the user types '\r' in the search query. By default the query is treated as a plain string. It doesn't sound very elegant, but I think it makes sense -- if the user at any point realizes that he needs a regex he can switch it on very easily, without losing what he has typed before. Pentadactyl uses these flags to toggle case sensitivity, too, and I think it would make sense for us to add that in as well in the future. @philc and @ilya, any comments on the UX or on the code?

Also, we should probably document this somewhere. Perhaps we could start a guide that's similar to what Pentadactyl has, and link to it via our help dialog?

[int3]

Okay, I polished up the whole find service on the regex-find branch. It still needs a bit of refactoring but I think I'm mostly done. Here's what we have:

• Regex support (turned on by the \r escape sequence)
• Smartcase searching is the default now (case sensitivity is triggered by uppercase characters)
• Case sensitivity can be enforced using the \I escape sequence
• Find queries are now global across tabs and persistent across browser sessions
• Page shortcuts e.g. on GitHub should no longer be triggered during find mode
• Find mode no longer triggers insert mode if there are input elements that match the query, but we can enter insert mode on one of the results by hitting <esc>. This last feature was the hardest / most complicated to build, due to weird DOM issues.

Thoughts about the code: Could probably be more OO and better encapsulated, but I didn't want to create too much code churn by moving everything into a new file. I definitely plan to create a domUtils.js file though. @philc -- if this is good, I'm going to add some user documentation and merge it into master.

[philc]

Thanks Jez. I'll have a look.

[int3]

I've made several changes to other aspects of vimium that aren't directly related to the find service but are incompatible with the differences between regex-find and master, so I've left them on regex-find. These changes in turn make future ones more likely to be incompatible. If it's fine with you, I'd like to merge regex-find back into master first, so I don't have to juggle branches. We can still refine the code from there.

[int3]

This feature was completed and merged a while ago.

[ElijahLynn]

Just want to say thanks for all the work on this feature, it is great!

[niedzielski]

For others seeking to turn this feature on as the default behavior, this is under options as "Treat find queries as regular expressions". It's great!

[sohanglal]

For others seeking to turn this feature on as the default behavior, this is under options as "Treat find queries as regular expressions". It's great!

Thanks @niedzielski!