Better UI for Multiline Search & Replace in a single file

[anacondaq]

I'm new to VSCode, i like many things in this editor, but i miss a lot of really useful and important options which missing for some reasons at Visual Code. One of such feature is Powerful Search Options.

About what i'm talking about?

What will you see on image above?

1. Multiline Search which will search in opened document for the text. Also, this feature support searching for multiple lines at once in multiple documents very easy.
2. Multiline Search when you enter in search fild your lines automatically find in text this text (if it exist) and highlite it
3. You can manipulate with multiline search the same like with one-line search.
4. You can select multiple lines via ALT + SHIFT + Arrow Up / Arrow Down multiple lines, then you can click HOME button and all lines will be selected with multiple cursor and you can apply some changes to your multiline search like below:

Why multiline feature like in sublime text should be implemented?

Because of this feature, time saved in 10-20x times. People like me who working with a lot of patches, reject hunks, etc things and working with a lot of searching things will find this features very useful. Example of usage can be: fixing .rej files, applying patches, big diffs, applying some changes to multiple lines at once.

Please think about it well, this feature is market-killer, and in one day even if you reject the issue today, community will request this feature for sure, no exeptions, just time will show. Because this feature minimize stupid tasks and time for doing the same job, productivty increased, all happy.

More info about feature: http://docs.sublimetext.info/en/latest/search_and_replace/search_and_replace.html

[sandy081]

@Anacondaqq VS Code also supports multi line search in a file for which you need to enable regex option and provide eol characters for line separators. But, I see that in your video it makes much easier to copy multiple lines and search for it just by pasting it and I liked it.

[anacondaq]

I saw Electron & VSCode source code, and i think my request will be very hard to implement...
This is so bad... 😿

[michaelperrin]

This is one of the features I miss the most indeed.

Finding and replacing chunks of text (I mean multiline text) is really useful. Using \n is not a solution, as you need to make the change the text you have copied before pasting it to the search and replace inputs.

I would therefore really like to get "textareas" instead of "input text" fields for search and replace fields.