Crappy Text Search on Typst Web

General
1

I love Typst for what it can do and how rapidly it’s developed. But the web app’s search function has some serious usability issues:

  • No hit counter - It doesn’t show total matches or current position (e.g., “3 of 12”). This makes navigation needlessly difficult.

  • Broken text selection workflow - If you select text and press Ctrl+F, it searches fine the first time. But if you select different text and press Ctrl+F again while the search box is open, it ignores the new selection entirely. You’re forced to either close the search box between queries or manually paste into it—both kill productivity when doing find/replace operations.

I thought text search was a solved problem, so maybe I’m missing something obvious. Has anyone else run into this, or found a workaround?

2

Any web app issues and missing features should be reported to GitHub · Where software is built, avoiding duplicates.

The second text selection works, but the “Find” text field is not updated.

3

The first point has been mentioned 8 months ago without updates: Ctrl-f does not display number of matches · Issue #359 · typst/webapp-issues · GitHub

The second issue wasn’t reported yet, so I’ve added it there as well.

I posted here to increase awareness and see if anyone has workarounds, working on longer documents without functional search is genuinely frustrating.

2 Likes
4

I mean, you can always switch to a local setup, unless you need the collaboration stuff. Then this issue can be fixed in many ways.