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YoYoGames / GameMaker-Bugs

Public tracking for GameMaker bugs
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Improve Search, Filtering and Sorting in IDE Preferences Window #2837

Open OptimalNoob opened 11 months ago

OptimalNoob commented 11 months ago

Is your feature request related to a problem?

The time spent searching for a specific setting in the main IDE Preferences Window is more than ideal when needing to configure a new install or needing to adjust IDE configurations in general.

Describe the solution you'd like

When accessing the main IDE Preferences window (File > Preferences), I would like to see all the Preferences categories sorted alphabetically instead of the current, what seems to be, "last updated feature or latest implemented" order it seems to take.

In addition to the sorting of each category, it would be super helpful to include a simple keyword search field above all of the categories to quickly drill down the tree of preferences to find a specific setting you may know the name of, or if your search keyword is mentioned in a "hint" or "description" of the Setting you might be looking for.

While searching, options in the Preferences tree could disappear, leaving only the results of your search and the root category they're apart of, for example, so other possible hits to your search will be readily available to click through if multiple preferences happen match your keyword(s)

Describe alternatives you've considered

There currently is no workaround from what I can tell within the IDE itself. Searching for a setting online may yield the "path" to the setting, but manual visual searching is still required to navigate through the tree of available Preferences in the UI, and an alphabetically sorted Tree could help cut down on the time it takes to search down the list of available Categories and the Preferences within them, a search bar providing even more efficiency.

Additional context

Sorting and Search Mockup

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Search and Filter Mockup

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backYard321 commented 11 months ago

I'm also not a fan of virtually every editor section having a "Confirm Dialogs" subsection - the sidebar feels really bloated as a result.

DragoniteSpam commented 3 months ago

This has kind of always been a problem with the Preferences window, but the more stuff gets added to GameMaker the worse it gets.

You can sort of use the ctrl+t command palette to access Game Options, if you know what you're looking for, and it says it also works for Preferences but either that doesn't work or I turned it off somehow and, ironically, don't know where to go to turn it back on:

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