Sometimes I do a search on the site on my PC. Then I sometimes want to search again, with the same parameters, but only in the thread itself.
If I start a new search, it gives me the option to search “In This Topic” and if I select it, a blue box will appear and then search for the search parameters within the thread.
But if I want to preserve my pre existing search parameters, I can’t just add “In This Topic”. I thought that if you started to type “In This Topic” to the search parameters, it would autocomplete but it doesn’t. I have to either erase my parameters or cut and paste them in order to change my search to a thread specific search.
Am I typing the wrong thing in the search bar? What’s weird is that on mobile you can probably do it since there is a checkbox for “in this topic”. But even in “advanced search” on my PC with Chrome, it doesn’t have a checkbox for “in this topic”.
Search Menu
| Description |
Key |
| Move selection up and down |
↑/↓ |
| Insert selection into open composer |
A |
| Launches full page search |
CtrlEnter |
It looks like in the search window type any letter and it prompts a new search and you now choose “In This Topic” and delete the extra letter.
So why does the otherwise standard Ctrl-F fail to work for in-page searches on this board? I’m using Chrome on Win11.
Ctrl-F doesn’t work as only about 20 posts are loaded on the page at a time. So for small threads it works fine, but when you have 200 posts, nearly useless.
As @What_Exit says, ^F can only search the text of the webpage that has been loaded already. For a lot of old-style web pages, the entire page loads all at once (up front when the page is first accessed), and ^F works fine on that
Discourse loads only a chunk of comments out of the entire hypothetical page of comments, and unloads them as you scroll away. So you never have the entire “page” of comments to search.
The forum’s search tool with “Search this topic” set is the only thing that works for that.