Whitespace characters in the global search textbox

Permanently deleted user

Created November 17, 2015 01:01

How to turn off whitespace/tab symbols in the global search (ctrl-shift-f) text box? Whitespace characters display is set to off in the editor and I even set the color for the whitespace symbol to white but I still see them in the search textbox so it seems to be controlled by a different parameter...

2 comments

Stephen Friedrich

Created November 17, 2015 09:26

I don't think you can.

I think the argument goes like:

It can easily happen to include leading or trailing slashes when copy-pasting into the box (or even accidentally type two space in between manually)
If white space is not shown, it is not noticed
the search results will be at least incomplete
you will base decisions like deleting source on incomplete data
your break your application

(Probably your application would still compile, but be broken in more subtle ways. After all if the changes would affect java source code dependencies, then you would have used "Find Usages" rather than "Find in Path".)

Permanently deleted user

Created November 18, 2015 01:11

Of course, there are obvious benefits of using whitespace characters but what's the point of forcing this behaviour? All those whitespace characters are really annoying, especially with no way to turn them off. Created an issue(https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-148119). Hopefuly this will be addressed promptly, it doesn't seem like a complicated problem to resolve.

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