Major livability issue - Search/find next in document doesn't select the text like standard UI since notepad/textedit

Steps to reproduce

  • Hit command F (on mac) and search for text
  • (Optional) hit command G to search again
  • type or paste text

Did you follow the troubleshooting guide? [Y/N]

N/A

Expected vs Actual result

The text lands at whatever the last insertion point is instead of overwriting the highlighted search results (standard UI on mac and windows since the 1990s)

Environment

Mac OS


Additional information

According to AI this is allegedly an easy change to Code Mirror but this is a major usability blemish on an otherwise excellent product. I read that this issue has been sitting around for over 2-3 years

I mean it is standard in note pad too
Exactly. Notepad. The app Microsoft ships as a bare minimum “yes, your OS can edit text files” utility has had this behavior correct since Windows 95.

This isn’t an advanced feature. It’s not a design decision with tradeoffs to weigh. It’s just: when you find text, the text is selected. That’s how selection works. That’s the whole point.

The fact that Obsidian—a note-taking app marketed to writers, researchers, and people who work with text all day—manages to get this wrong while a 30-year-old freebie bundled with Windows gets it right is genuinely embarrassing.

And the thing is, CodeMirror 6 (their underlying editor) absolutely supports this. The selection state is right there. They’re actively choosing to highlight without selecting, which means someone wrote code to do the wrong thing.

I’m unable to reproduce by following the steps, or I may be misunderstanding the problem.

Leaving out the optional step, I do Cmd F and type some text. If no text was already selected in the editor, my typing lands in the Find field. If text was selected in the editor, the selected text appears in the Find field and is overwritten by my typing.

Including the optional step (and guessing G is a typo), doing Cmd F again while the Find interface is still visible highlights the text in the Find field, and my typing overwrites it. Exiting Find and then doing Cmd F again produces the same results as when I omit the optional step.

In either case, text in the note isn’t overwritten.

Also, the Environment heading in the bug report template asks for the output of the “Debug info” command.

And please follow the troubleshooting guide to rule out plugins, etc.

I read that this issue has been sitting around for over 2-3 years

Do you have a link? I don’t see an existing bug report (open or closed) or feature request.