Why doesn’t Windows Live Writer have ‘find and replace’?

  • Article

One of the most requested features of Windows Live Writer is ‘find and replace’.  This is the ability to quickly change one string to another string in a document.  Its found in the most complex programs like Visual Studio and Microsoft Word as well as the most simple programs like Notepad(as seen below).

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So why doesn't a fully functional blog editing client like Windows Live Writer have this feature?

Its all about trade offs.  Every feature takes a certain amount of time create and test before it can be included into a product.  And in the case of Windows Live Writer, which uses Internet Explorer to create the WYSIWYG editor, there was already a free  way to get find by itself.  Internet Explorer provides find functionality to applications that host mshtml through IDM_FIND.  So the decision came down to whether or not the team should replace the find functionality IE gives for free with our own version that does find and replace.  I wasn’t on the Windows Live Writer team when this decision came up, as I’m sure it was many moons ago, so I can’t speak about any details of that conversation.  However, I can tell you, that through Twitter, blog posts, and our forums we have heard a lot of customers tell us that we made the wrong decision; enough that we are going to revisit the decision for our future releases. 

Thank you to everyone that gave their feedback on this issue and others! It is greatly appreciated and gives us a greater idea of our users' needs.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 16, 2009
    PingBack from http://asp-net-hosting.simplynetdev.com/why-doesn%e2%80%99t-windows-live-writer-have-%e2%80%98find-and-replace%e2%80%99/
  • Anonymous
    May 05, 2009
    I am confused on this logic. It seems to me that if Word or IE have this functionality already that there should be some library or at least some code for this lieing around some where..
  • Anonymous
    May 05, 2009
    That is kind of the problem.  IE has a library that offers us tons of functionality that lets do all kinds of stuff, however, it doesn't offer use "Find and Replace".  Word might have some code to do find and replace, but chances are it doesn't work with the mshtml library Internet Explorer is providing us.
  • Anonymous
    May 11, 2009
    Also worth noting that in plain text editors like Notepad, Find/Replace is a trivial problem--less so when you're dealing with a live HTML DOM, as the text you're trying to find may span element boundaries.
  • Anonymous
    March 18, 2010
    lol u have the same name as me but urs is spelled wrong :P