Find Enhancements

While not a lot of people understand regular expressions, let's make it easier to find things for the purposes of people who use spelling variations (and other concerns):

Bug Reference : 4875

Understandably, the plus character '+' is a special character used in regular expressions (regex). *Unfortunately* it is one of, if not the most common character used in item descriptions and searching against it should be simplified.

Currently, '+' needs to be escaped with a slash character '\'.

Example: 'rC\+\+' finds rC++

For usability purposes, since regex is not understood by Joe Gamer, default find searches to not use regex and assume everything entered in find is literal.

Example: 'rC++' finds rC++

To enable regex, if the search text was prefixed by a certain character, that character would be removed from the regex text that follows.

Example if '|' was the regex trigger character: '|rC\+*+' finds rC+ and rC++

Essentially, if you leave out the special regex trigger prefix character, suggesting '|', all special regex characters will be escaped with '\' for searching purposes.

The common American English spelling for 'armour' is 'armor'. By default, I know that's what I type in. For usability, 'armor' should be used as a default alias for 'armour'. 4875

(taken from Interface Improvement Ideas (Bulk)

Once upon a time (probably around v0.4 or 0.5), it was possible to reuse previous search terms in the Ctrl-F screen with up and down arrows. Now, nothing is saved on exit, and you can only reuse the one previous search. This is especially annoying when you use complex searches (with and, or, …). It would be nice to reinstate old behaviour, i.e. use up and down arrows to view & select previous terms.
Ideally, search terms could optionally be saved in a file for subsequent games, a bit like macros are handled. — Nexos 2011-03-09 10:29

Saving the search term between games seems pointless to me, but after a save+reload in the same game, why not? — KiloByte 2011-03-09 10:43

When you're trying to find glowing, embroidered, or runed orcish, elven, plain robes and leather armours, it would be useful to be able to pull up the search from the last game that worked without having to hit the crawl syntax notes.txt file on the home computer. Saving them like macros doesn't sound like an insurmountable task, but I haven't even glanced at the code. — jejorda2 2011-03-09 14:55

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there doesn't seem to be a way to run the previous search with modifications ? I only know how to issue a new search from scratch, or to run exactly the same search again.

Also, here's a regular expression for finding unknown items:

(amulet|ring| staff| book|potions?|labeled.*|crystal ball|rod|wand)$

Note it only works for mass-produced items, not randarts. It doesn't include most of misc items because they are predictable. — b0rsuk 2011-07-01 10:22