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When you've finished Finding and Replacing using the Find/Replace window, it's generally a good idea to Save the changes. Yet Control-S Save just beeps at you, it doesn't work in the Find/Replace window.

So this is either an enhancement request, or a report of a curious anomaly, is it even a bug? When the frontmost window is Find/Replace, it's acting on a document. Please make Control-S Save that document rather than just complain and not Save.

Thanks, Cris

However, a menu command File:Save will work on the window behind the Find/Replace window.

Thanks for the suggestion Hamid.

I've just tried it and, since the Find/Replace window is frontmost, Menu > File > Save is greyed out. So no, neither that nor Control-S work for me...

Cris

Sorry, I meant to say a menu macro command, so if you save as a Nisus Writer macro with nwm extension it will work.
You can assign a keyboard shortcut to the macro or invoke it form the macro menu.

Thanks, Hamid.

I've saved this nwm file and, having allocated Command S to it via Preferences, my Save now works as needed.

But other users might not know how to implement such a work-around for this problem, so most users will still find it a valuable enhancement suggestion...

Appreciate your help

Cris

In general keyboard commands operate on the frontmost window, so that's why Save is disabled, ie: one cannot save the find & replace dialog or its contents. Some keyboard commands do apply (eg: formatting menus for attribute-sensitive searches) and so those are enabled.

Perhaps Save might be a special case and might be worth enabling/chaining to the document just behind, but it could also be confusing.

Hi Martin,

I don't think anyone would be confused. Find/Replace works on the window behind it (second frontmost window?) so Saving any changes when in Find/Replace would work on exactly the same (second frontmost) window that Replace has just changed. So Save is indeed a special case - these changes are exactly why you now need to Save!

If you have Autosave checked you will not need to do anything to save the file.

I do have AutoSave checked, but I have consciously set that to save to a temporary file rather than to the actual one...

I have been working with Nisus for a long time, and done hundreds, probably thousands, of find/replace actions. I have never noticed this before.

But in terms of work flow F/R is easy to do and it's also easy to mess-up a file using it. From this logic it makes more sense to save before you do the F/R rather than after. If you want to save after, it's probably best to switch to the document and review the effects of the F/R action before saving, so the need to be able to save the file with Find dialog still in front seems counter-intuitive to me. (Are you worried that Nisus will crash in the time it takes to bring the document to the front?)

Or are you chaining multiple F/R commands and want to save at each step? This seems excessive to me. If you want to do several F/R actions in a row, and you are worried about needing to repeat this, I recommend saving the actions in a macro. If you do it that way, you can then reopen the last saved version of the document and run the F/R again very easily.

Generally I have fared well relying on Nisus' Autosave and Undo.

Saving in Find/Replace window is possibly more dangerous (especially without backup files), so it has never bothered me that Nisus behaves different in that respect than e.g. TextEdit, and I always have accepted it as intended and desired behavior from Nisus.

Dirk Barends