User-managed find pattern library

[tangledhelix]

Proposal:

A panel where users can manage their own library of find patterns (which may or may not be regular expressions). These patterns could be stored with some label (name) of the user's choosing, and summoned into Search (or Replace?) text boxes.

I'd have to think about how this would work in practice. There's already a search history, and we wouldn't want to lose that. So how would the user choose from this library? It's not as simple as tossing a dropdown in place.

One option is to keep the existing search history and just append these memorized patterns to the list. (If the user has a lot of them, that could become unwieldy to navigate).

[srjfoo]

GGPrefs stores only the most recent 10 search strings, so adding them to the recent search strings is only likely to cause the older search strings to roll off the list.

I don't actually see anything wrong with a separate drop-down menu for saved searches except that the search dialog is very nice and compactly laid out right now. Adding a traditional button for that would disturb the balance. Though it just occurred to me ... could a divider be added if the user had saved search strings, with the saved strings going below the divider?

[rtonsing]

You read my mind, having them below a divider in the recents list. Maybe just a menu item to add strings, not in the search ddialog. Overall a great idea, I keep a separate list of common search strings, this would be much better.