Why do most programs separate Find and Replace dialogs?

Question

Why do most programs separate Find and Replace dialogs? Obviously, I'm talking about apps like text editors and word processors, apps that are used for editing content.

It just seems strange, at best, to completely separate functions that are basically two sides of the same coin, and can get downright frustrating when they're implemented as separate windows instead of tabs in the same window and you decide to replace some of the already found matches.

From the interface design perspective, I don't see how the inclusion of another text box and two more buttons required for Replace (all other options are usually the same for both Find and Replace) causes such a clutter in the interface and cognitive overload that it requires a basic Find version for "non-power users".

The only program I can think of that combines these two is TextEdit. (Ironically, there's a question on Apple StackExchange about where the Replace function is hiding in TextEdit, but that's because it's named just "Find" instead of something sensible like "Find or Replace".)

Answer 1

An interesting question, and one that I think many of us might have pondered before without really diving too deep into the possible issues. From a purely design perspective, I can think of a number of plausible reasons:

• Convention: the first person did it this way, and then everybody else followed because "that's how it's done".
• Safety first: separating a destructive action (replace) from a non-destructive action (find) is important so that people don't accidentally wipe out information without getting a confirmation first. I assume that 'Undo' wasn't always available or that there are other implementation details I am not aware of.
• Ease of design/implementation: perhaps it is easy to create the find and replace functions separately as different modules (because not all programs need both), and then it will be easy to do the user interface design when you add or remove one or the other feature.

In the end, if it is such an issue to the end-user one would expect that these software will have changed it, so perhaps people are used to it (much in the same way we still use QWERTY rather than DVORAK or Colemak keyboard layouts).

Answer 2

Both Find and Find and Replace are related functionally as you mention. But both actions seem to be orthogonal in terms of what user need (mindset) they cater to. You will know in advance either you want to find something or you rather want to substitute occurrences of something. In the latter case it just happens that you need to find occurrences of the thing you want to substitute, but this is a secondary concern or even not important in some cases.

Therefore, presenting only one option called Find and Replace will confuse users who simply want to find something. They won't interpret this action as the one that let's them accomplish what they need. Likewise, having Find that offers replacing will not seem like the appropriate action if they need to substitute something in the doc.

Answer 3

If you can expect your users to be power text editor users, for example programmers, then it makes sense to combine these dialogs into one, or, even better, make it a toolbar and show real-time results as you type. This is an expected feature for development tools nowadays, as it speeds up the editing process greatly. IDEs (integrated development environments) usually do a pretty good job at this, for example all JetBrains products or Qt Creator by The Qt Company.

An example by JetBrains:

Answer 4

I see this as new behaviour. Without an old install of MSOffice to test I can't be absolutely sure, but in the past find/replace dialog boxes were often modal, and covered quite a lot of text. For find only tools this isn't necessary - they tend to have 2-4 controls of which only one is a text box (wide). Replace requires at least another text box and button, usually more ("replace all" etc.). Also buttons may need clearer labels in replace as the consequences of errors are larger - bigger again. So a find tool can fit in a status bar or tool bar at a width you can take in at a glance. Replace is just too big for this. That also hints at why new versions of word put "advanced find" in with replace despite using a sidebar which is big enough (the space appears to be used to show the locations of found items).

There's a trend towards non-intrusive "find" tools, e.g. in the status bar. Examples: Libreoffice; Firefox; Adobe Reader (the latter two are specifically included as an example of the new method, where "replace" isn't used)

MS Word (and possibly the rest of Office, though not Outlook while writing an email) uses a rather different sidebar "navigation" box. This provides different capabilities to the legacy find/replace tool (tabs in the same dialog box, the find bit now called "advanced find"). The find/replace tool looks rather old-fashioned now, but probably can't change much without breaking power users' workflow (touch typists who like keyboard shortcuts and remember how many times to hit tab).

Answer 5

Find is sensible with a non-modifiable document. Replace is not. Historically, was "replace" greyed-out or not displayed in read-only mode? Maybe back when there was only space for one copy of the document on the 720k floppy disk?

These days, it's normal that the document's text is always modifiable and it's the file that is not, So it is "Save" that is greyed-out, to indicate that "Save as" is required. (You also often get a warning when you open the file read-only).

A mistaken global replace of something with (say) the null string, is a bit catastrophic, especially if "undo" is not capable of reverting a global replace in one click. So maybe it still makes sense to have a completely different menu entry for the option which is intrinsically a lot more "dangerous".

Answer 6

There's a lot of history to text editors. e.g. vi which is one of the oldest separated these out as there is a defined split between viewing a document (find) and editing a document (replace).

In technical terms they're quite different things, like GET vs POST for the web, and text editors are typically quite technical tools.

Word Processors less so but I assume they took inspiration from Text Editors.

I suspect also, but I can't find the data, the find operations are done much more often than replace operations.

Answer 7

It's this way to prevent you from doing disastrous things. Replace should be disabled and never used.

If you worked with XCode and Swift for a while you will realize that the missing refactoring methods for Swift are actually a blessing. They force you to think ahead of naming stuff right, so you won't need refactoring/renaming.

For normal (non Swift) IDEs you could argue that replace is evil too, as you better perform a refactoring method than randomly changing all matching strings in the project.

Warning: This answer is soaked with sarcasm but might contain a little truth.