New and Improved Search Commands

Among a slew of updates in the last few months, the Howl editor has received some exciting enhancements to its search capabilities in the unreleased master branch.

Searching Backwards and Jumping Around

Firstly, a new command called buffer-search-backward - bound to ctrl_r - implements a fast backwards interactive search. Just invoke it and type away to find the previous occurrence of whatever text you are typing.

Secondly, both buffer-search-forward (ctrl_f) and buffer-search-backward now highlight all matches, while still highlighting the primary match with a different style:

What makes this even more useful is that you can press ctrl_f or ctrl_r again, while the search is active, to quickly jump to the next or previous match (the up and down arrow keys can be used as well).

As with the original search command, hitting enter at any point moves your cursor to the currently highlighted primary match, while hitting esc reverts it to its original position.

Matching Whole Words

Plain searches are nice but not very effective when you want to look for whole words, such as identifiers in code that could be sub-strings of other identifiers.

Two new commands - buffer-search-word-forward and buffer-search-word-backward (bound to ctrl_period and ctrl_comma) - match whole words only. They highlight all occurrences of the current word at cursor. The word is determined by the configured word pattern which depends on the current mode and the buffer.

In short, you can position your cursor on a word that interests you and hit ctrl_period to highlight all visible occurrences of the same word, as you can see here:

Using ctrl_comma does the same but also jumps to the previous matching word. Similar to the other search commands, jumping to the next or previous match is as simple as using the up or down arrow keys.

Hope you enjoy these enhancements! Stay tuned for more news about other exciting updates.