Find in files within scope selector

[keith-hall]

Problem description

Sometimes it is useful to perform a find in files search only for variables, or only for comments, or to exclude strings etc. Having to craft the right regex for this can be extremely hard work, especially if your codebase consists of multiple programming languages.

Preferred solution

A new panel, very much like the Find in Files panel, but with an additional input field - a scope selector to perform the search in. Equivalent to opening the file, selecting all text matching a scope selector and performing a search inside the selection.

Alternatives

If syntax highlighting could be applied to search results, it could be done as a post regex search step in the Find Results buffer... But I understand that isn't likely to ever happen... #4367

Additional Information

• forum post
• sometimes plugins like AutoSetSyntax are able to do a much better job of deciding what syntax to open a file as than ST's limited first_line_match and file name/extension mapping. It would be great if that was somehow taken into account too...