Improving Search Result Navigation in the Chromium Developer Console

As detailed in my previous blog post on Adding Support for Regular Expression Search in the Chromium Developer Console, some months ago I set out to make it possible to search for regular expressions in the Chromium/Google Chrome developer console. The task turned out to be more complicated than I anticipated however, and I was asked by the responsible developers to write a separate patch first to improve the console’s search result navigation.

The thing was, as I discovered, that the console originally considered whole lines as search results, not individual results per line. So that, if there were for example two search results on the same line, one could not navigate between the two of them (only to the corresponding line). Not only was this bad from a usability perspective, but it got in the way of implementing a sane regular expression search in the console. So, I agreed to write a separate patch to modify search navigation behaviour to be instead like in the browser itself; i.e., every search result is marked individually (independently of lines) and the one currently navigated to is marked especially.