As a Roblox developer, it is now too hard to see where I’m using common strings, numbers, constants, and commented out code. I used rely on selected text being highlighted through the whole script for this.
Previously, when you double clicked on any word in the script editor, it would be selected and highlighted throughout the whole script. This functionality was recently changed to highlight the word at your cursor without double clicking, but now this highlight only happens if your cursor is within is a specific type of symbol, rather than any string.
A common thing that I used to do was double click on a string used in FindFirstChild or IsA to see everywhere in my script where I was using that same string. I also used to do the same for true/false values to see if I was assigning everything correctly (since they are highlighted the same color and my eyes can sometimes gloss over the words). I also relied on this for commented out code; if I’m making changes but some commented out code isn’t ready to be thrown away, I need to update it as well, which I relied on this highlighting behavior for when I was renaming variables or replacing common strings of calculations.
The behavior I used to rely on was the selected whole word being highlighted through the whole script, but now it is only symbols of a specific type getting highlighted globally, rather than the selected text in all code, strings, and comments.
E.g. behavior in Sublime Text. I find it extremely useful to be able to pick out any word or number regardless of if it is a string, variable, comment, or keyword. Doing this is ubiquitous and thus difficult to explain the value of.
I would like the old behavior for globally highlighting selected whole words to be restored in addition to the new behavior so old functionality I relied on is still there. If a whole word is selected, it should highlight all instances of that whole word regardless of where it appears, taking priority over highlighting the symbol the cursor is inside of.
Thank you for the feedback, this is really useful @PeZsmistic. I know you mentioned that you would like double clicking to highlight all instances of a variable, would you like to see the same functionality for single clicking on an instance? We can enable double clicking to highlight all instances while enabling single clicking to only highlight symbol instances.
I personally lean towards thinking that single clicking to highlight all instances of the targeted symbol is too noisy, and generates a lot of distracting movement in the periphery of my vision when I’m trying to focus on the line or area of code that I’m working on. Double clicking was much cleaner in my opinion, and when I wanted to see all highlighted instances, I explicitly “asked” for them by performing the double click.
However, if there is some good reason to keep the single click behavior, I’ll probably get used to it, hence why I’ve asked for the old double click behavior in addition to the single click behavior for symbols. I can turn the contrast down so doesn’t bother me too much, but it still feels a bit janky when trying to select things, so I think it might be better to fully stick with double click only.
E.g. double click to select flashes the highlight briefly which is unpleasant.
The current biggest problem is the loss of the ability to easily highlight all instances of arbitrary strings in the script, not just variables. I would like this ability back, be it by extending the single click behavior to highlight the currently targeted word regardless of its symbol type (but this will be even more noisy), or preferably by restoring the double click behavior for indiscriminately highlighting all instances of the selected whole word.
Does that answer your question? I’m not sure if I understood clearly enough.
Yeah that answers my question! We added the single click behavior to match other IDEs and make it easier for developers too see all instances of a symbol. We will add back the double click behavior in the next release, thank you for the feedback!
Just want to make sure this hasn’t dropped off the radar since it has been a while.
This is still important to me since Roblox necessitates working a lot with strings for things like FindFirstChild / WaitForChild, IsA, and child indexing for names with spaces. I used the double click to highlight all occurrences behavior very frequently for strings in my code to check for typos, to see where else I’m indexing something, etc. Usage was very ubiquitous.