I’ve quotes two of the G+ comments as they perfectly reflect my point of view: the non-modal search and IDE Insight – introduced somewhere after XE3 – are a dork to use.
I’m doing more Delphi work lately and these being non-modal seriously hinder my work (and it gets progressively worse on a 3K or 4K monitor).
In my book: why implement a feature to emulate the competition when you do it so badly?
So: are there any experts around that bring back the old search and IDE Insight behaviour back?
Asbjørn Heid, Oct 5, 2015:
+Marco Cantù I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned it before, but hey:
- The new edit field cannot be placed in a position which does not require significant eye-focus change to read. This means it is significantly more cumbersome to use, as focus must be transferred to some “out of sight” area. In addition one does not get the same instant feedback that the IDE did register your F6 keypress. The old one was “in your face” instantly when you pressed F6, so no need to take your eyes off the form you’re designing, and it left no doubt about F6 being registered or not.
- The dropdown list with suggestions that pops up when you type is much more difficult to read than the list in the old one, both due to positioning (thanks to the above) and due to length until it’s heavily constrained by input.
- From what I recall, the new edit field does not behave the same when invoked repeatedly, requiring more keystrokes to get the same effect compared to the old. I haven’t used XE3 in ages though so I don’t recall the specifics anymore, just that the new feels more clunky to use.
That’s just off the top of my head. Yes I still use it, but not nearly as much as I did, and when I do it’s one to two orders of magnitude slower to use compared to the old one. Not because it searches slower, but because of the issues described above.
David Heffernan, Oct 5, 2015:
+Marco Cantù I second what +Asbjørn Heid said. When I press F6 now, I never know where to put my eyes. In XE3 a dialog popped up which took my attention.
Similarly for the non-modal search, although somehow I’m more used to the modern version now. When compared with VS though the Delphi search is very lacking. The great thing about the VS search is that it gives live feedback on which text in the edit window match the text in the search window. If Delphi would do that it would make an immense difference. It’s definitely worth spending some time in VS using their search facility. And indeed in other IDEs / editors.
There was a lot of negative feedback on both of these changes when they were released. Surely Embarcadero noticed that.
–jeroen
via: F6 or [Ctrl] + . does not open IDE Insight on DX. What am I missing?…
