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The icons for the "Replace" and "Replace All" buttons could be more consistent #251496

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@ThoAppelsin

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@ThoAppelsin
  • OS: macOS 15.5
  • Visual Studio Code version: 1.101.0

Currently, the "Replace" (R) and "Replace All" (RA) buttons on the find and replace dialog are as follows:
Image

They differ in following ways:

  1. R shows "b" being replaced to "c" while RA shows "ab" being replaced to "ac".
  2. R has only "c" as boxed while RA has another box stacked behind the boxed "ac".

Difference 1 is much more visually prominent. Yet, Difference 1 has nothing to do with the actual distinction between R and RA. Without noticing the Difference 2, one can make no sense of the actual functions of and differences between the buttons. If one were to guess the difference between the two by just looking at those two, one could say either:

  1. "Oh, so the first one can only replace single characters, but the second one can do multiple characters at once." or
  2. "Oh, so the first one can only change the entire string (i.e., perhaps only if the full-word matches are found), but the second one can do partial replacements."

The cue for multiple replacements comes from Difference 2, the one that can hardly be noticed.

I suggest that the icons are changed so that

  1. they do not differ in the sense of Difference 1 (so that the users are not misled to think of irrelevant functions) and
  2. they differ in the sense of Difference 2 in a more obvious way, perhaps by stacking 3-4 layers instead of just 2 (so that it becomes prominent).

An example I made it with paint:

Image

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