Arrrgghh -- Find and Replace

[Timothy Miller]

For reasons I should not disclose, I am accustomed to do a simple 
"Find-in-fields-in-this-stack" with command-F, rather than command-M 
followed by keyboard input of  'find "whatever"' Okay, it's not *way* 
different, but it's a little different.

Several times in the last few days, I have typed command-f, the word 
I want to search for, and return, before I realized that I was 
unintentionally using the "find and replace" window. A couple of 
other checkboxes were checked off, in addition to "field text," and 
the stack was not small. I had time to brew a pot of tea, preheat the 
oven, and bake a dozen cookies before it was done searching, so I 
could resume the work I was hurrying to finish on time. :-( (My 
computer isn't all that fast -- a 466 mhz G4 -- but it isn't normally 
a slowpoke, either. A conventional find is plenty fast.)

It happened to me again a few minutes ago. Okay -- I did it to 
myself. But really, how hard could it be to add a gosh darned "stop 
searching" button to the find and replace window??!! Command-period 
doesn't work. I couldn't get the msg box to come up. I considered 
command-Q, but it didn't seem like a very good idea. I tried to turn 
on "suppress messages" but that seemed unresponsive.

Maybe there's a trick to stopping the slow find-and-replace. If so, 
please tell me. If not, is there some good reason this obvious 
feature is absent?

Tim Miller