@Coises

I can’t tell if you’ve considered this, but one way to do it would be in conjunction with hiding lines. You could hide lines that don’t meet the criterion of -M through +N, where M would be a user-chosen number of lines before the hit, and N a user-selected count of lines after the search match.

At first thought, I believe that would be significantly easier to implement than doing it in the search results window. As a plus, it (or a close approximation) could even be available after the search with something like an “expand visible blocks” command.

The downside is that Show commands only work on the current document; you can’t show in all open documents (and it wouldn’t even make sense for find in files, whenever I finally get that done). At present, my use of hidden lines (using Scintilla’s function directly) and Notepad++’s way of doing it (keeping its own internal table, inaccessible to plugins, of what ranges are hidden) are at odds with one another, which causes any changes my plugin has made to hidden lines to be lost when any other tab is switched into the view. Thus far, I have not been able to devise any solution to this.

I can’t tell if you’ve considered this, but one way to do it would be in conjunction with hiding lines. You could hide lines that don’t meet the criterion of -M through +N, where M would be a user-chosen number of lines before the hit, and N a user-selected count of lines after the search match.

However, it might be a nice suggestion for the Search++ plugin.

Noted. This is certainly the time to consider it, while things are still unstable and I’m not hesitant to make potentially breaking changes. (Not that I expect to get beyond that state for at least a couple of months yet.) It would probably entail redesigning the way I create a search results list, especially if it is to be dynamic (i.e., that you can decide after you’ve done the search that you need to see more context).

@Alain-Savard, if you’re interesting in weighing in on this plugin-in-progress (I’m the author), there’s a thread about it here.

Something like this has been proposed before, and I’ll have to assume that the developer and other code contributors, while they recognize the value of the idea, have thought that implementing it might be awkward – not coding it, but rather what the resulting solution looked like. So…I wouldn’t count on seeing it natively in Notepad++.

However, it might be a nice suggestion for the Search++ plugin.