Gosh, search and replace in a selection of text in VS Code drives me nuts.

I can’t even describe how exactly it does so, but it works against my intuition.

It’s funny how in 2019 we haven’t quite settled on UX for that!

For me, it’s super hard to grasp how this (search and replace in a selection of text) is supposed to work in VS Code, as in: how would the people who designed this part of the product like me to use it? Which workflow did they have in mind? I don’t seem to understand the magic behind it. I often seem to end up replacing things in the entire document as opposed to in the selection that I just carefully created a second before. All I can conclude so far is that trial and error don’t seem to get me far :-).

Trying to understand the behavior based on docs and reading GitHub issues then reveals that this thing is complex, that it can be configured with a number of special configuration options, and that many users experience WTF moments on a daily basis. Users keep posting videos and GIFs of their weird experiences (thanks!). Two of these WTF moments are well captured in the GIFs in this comment: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/17563#issuecomment-542656591 (from October 2019).

I can say that search and replace in a selection of text works much better, so much more intuitively, in Sublime Text 3 (by default).

In VS Code it turned out that setting editor.find.autoFindInSelection to true helps me quite a bit towards getting more predictable outcomes.

Feel free to leave a comment below if you have an anecdotal opinion about all this.

If you’d like to read along, I find these issues pretty entertaining:

• https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/17563
• https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/27083
• https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/60977

I particularly agree with this statement from November 2019:

I appreciate all the work and attention that has gone into this, but I don’t think I will ever be truly comfortable with Find/Replace in VS Code. The issue for me is that the “find in selection” button looks and feels like a toggle switch, not a trigger (or “fire button”).

If you flip a toggle switch from one position to the other, and then back to the original position, it should be as though you had never flipped the switch at all. With this mental model, it is always a shock and a disappointment when flipping the switch irreversibly destroys my carefully crafted manual selection.