Merged Selections When Searching for Consecutive Items [Option to disable merge?]

[selfish]

Check for existing issues

• Completed

Describe the feature

Issue: Merged Selections When Searching for Consecutive Items

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Open a document with the following content:

CATEGORY1\nitem1\nitem2\n\n\nCATEGORY2\nitem1

2. Press Cmd+F and search for \n.
3. Click "Select All" for all matches.
4. Press Enter/Return.

Actual Result:

The consecutive \n\n\n sequence is treated as a single selection, so the result is:

CATEGORY1
item1
item2
CATEGORY2
item1

Expected Result:

Each \n should be treated as a separate match. The expected output after the described flow should be:

CATEGORY1
item1
item2


CATEGORY2
item1

When replacing matches, I would expect individual occurrences, even when consecutive, to be selected as separate instances. This would prevent unintended merging when performing replacements.

If applicable, add mockups / screenshots to help present your vision of the feature

No response

[JosephTLyons]

Here are issues that are related, but not quite the same. Grouping them to keep the ideas together.

• Group multiple diagnostics from the same line to make a cleaner diagnostics view? #16573
• Merge overlapping ranges in the multibuffer view #13513

[marcospb19-cw]

@JosephTLyons about the labels, this one is not related to multi-buffers, it's the behavior when creating multiple cursors, OP is using "editor: select all matches" which also doesn't opens the multi-buffer view.

---

My shot at explaining this issue:

In other editors you can have two selections that "touch" each other, but don't merge, they'll only merge if you advance further.

In Zed they merge as soon as their boundaries touch.

An example: you can't select all tabs used in indentation and replace them by 4 spaces, because tabs are adjacent to each other and every adjacent selection is merged.

[selfish]

Thanks @marcospb19-cw - That's exactly what I intended this issue to reflect!