[vox-tech] Firefox "find" utility

[Peter Jay Salzman]

On Tue 20 Jun 06, 11:20 AM, Micah J. Cowan <micah at cowan.name> said:
> On Tue, Jun 20, 2006 at 11:09:35AM -0700, Bill Kendrick wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 20, 2006 at 11:46:05AM -0400, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> > > I find the FF find feature to be weaker than what I've come to expect from
> > > Unix tools.  For example, it would be really nice to specify regex type
> > > syntax, like
> > > 
> > >    ^foo
> > > 
> > > to find the substring "foo" abutted against the left margin.
> > 
> > 
> > Wouldn't that depend
> > on how wide your brower
> > is and how things are
> > word-wrapping? ;^)
> > 
> > I guess maybe you meant "at the beginning of a paragraph," "in the leftmost
> > cell of a table," "just after a <br> line break", etc.?
> 
> I doubt that's what he meant. After all, though it /does/ depend on how
> your browser is, it's the browser that is performing the search in the
> first place: it knows where all the line breaks are.

Yeah, that's 100% exactly what I meant.

> Myself, I'd probably never use ^ in firefox (unless the document were
> actually plaintext); but there's scads of times when I would've wanted
> basic regex support... The "dot" character, character classes, maybe
> word boundaries...

Stop it!  You're making me drool...   ;)

It's weird.  Stuff like this makes me realize how spoiled I am in terms of
using great software.  Basic regex support in FF find just seems like
something you'd expect to see.

Pete