Count search results in gedit.

Update September 21:
After all, I found some time to reimplement the algorithm for highlighting XML. It is now triggered by a new button in the toolbar. As it now does not run automatically, this will be another improvement to overall speed. Feel free to download the new version at the provided download link below or at github!

Update May 5:
Count results are now being displayed in the Status Bar instead of an alert window. Also, there were a couple of bug fixes. Feel free to download the new version at the provided download link below or at github!

Lately I was looking for a small but missing feature in gedit: I needed to be able to count all occurrances of a selected word. This is a standard feature in many other editors such as Notepad++ in the Windows world, for example. However, I didn’t come across a solution on the net, so I decided to write a little plug-in myself.

What it does: After marking a word the plug-in counts all occurrances of the selection in the current document. It adds a new button to the toolbar and an entry to the menu right in the “Search” section. On top of that you may trigger counting the selection by hitting “CTRL+SHIFT+F”. A small pop-up window will appear and show the results of the search. The results will be displayed in the status bar of the window.

How to use it: Simply mark a word, and have a look at the statusbar: The number of search results will be displayed there.

If you find it useful, feel free to download the plug-in here:

Donwload at github:
http://github.com/mmuell23/mmuell23

git clone http://github.com/mmuell23/mmuell23.git
cp -r mmuell23/gedittools/* ~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins

12 Replies to “Count search results in gedit.”

  1. Suggestions: (1) integrate this function into search dialog. (2) when nothing is selected, pop up a dialog to enter text for counting.

    Bug: Give wrong number of occurances for some texts (eg, [0]).

  2. Most characters giving wrong counts when they are concatenated, eg., ‘dd’, search ‘d’ and gave 1.

    Character ‘>’ couldn’t be found.

  3. Hi daxue,

    with the newest version this works fine. Tested it using your examples. Did you install the latest version of “gedittools” from the github repository?

    git clone http://github.com/mmuell23/mmuell23.git

    Then copy all files under gedittools to ~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins

    Be sure to delete the old plugin before doing that.

    Let me know if it works!

  4. Very useful, ta

    Noticed that the Gedit search menu shows the text:

    “Count occurances of selection”

    The correct spelling is “occurrences”, small point but I’m sure you’d want to know.

    Thanks again.

  5. Hi,
    This is a great tool but it doesn’t work well with large files. when I try to use large files after installing the plugin the gedit is much slower.

  6. Hi Nimrod,

    check the latest release at Github. The speed has massively improved due to a new algorithm.

    Matt

  7. if the keyword is at the first line, it always return 0 as the counted elements

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