Feedback for translations search

For translatewiki.net, I would like to have different buttons next to the standard skins (vector, in my case) search box, ordered by my usage priority here:

1. Search in translations to 'my target language' only.
2. Search in 'my source language' only. Currently that is fixed to English, but may be different in the future.
3. Search in translations to any language only.
4. Standard search.

Whether or not source/target languages are the ones currently selected for translation or taken from the user preferences is of lesser concern. Both are useful, the current translations settings are both more flexible and probably more confusing. All of those should open a new tab/window as instances when I do not want to keep the original window are too few to warrant even a choice for me.

Sometimes, I wish to be able to strict string matches on parameters, markup, wikitext, special characters, and parts of words, such as "$1|$2]] userna", which currently does not work.

Rarely, a "hide matches" mode, which only lists page titles, and you need a mouse action to see the matched text and its environment, would be a time saver.

Also rarely, a regular expression match would be useful for me, but I doubt that I would implement it myself, even if I knew how, since it's really rare. But maybe, it is easy? :-)

The same holds for a "case (in)sensitive" switch.

Thank you a lot for your valuable feedback. :)

By the way, your question triggered that I re-evaluated the Special:Search/Translate page, which I did not even have in mind for my above answer, because at some time in the past I found it was 100% useless for me, so I simply forgot about its existence. I found it still bewildering and useless now.

• On AJAX translation pages, I see several untranslated messages with a certain word. I want to find out, how that word had been translated in the past.
  • I type it in the search box. I get "No matches for 'search term'" before I hit Enter.
  • I hit Enter: nothing happens
  • I click the button and after some waiting time, I see a looong list of messages in maaaany languages that I do not understand and that do not help me. The messages originally on screen are often not among them, or they might be buried somewhere at position 23415 which I did not check for too long lists.
• There are two more lists: few languages, some message groups, both with figures that I interpret as hit counters.
  • If I click a language, its list entry doubles and get a hit list, usually with considerably fewer entries than shown with the language, very often none.
  • When I click a message group, its name is bolded, and the same happens: I get a list of different length, usually less than announced, often empty.
  • When I want to see the translation of a message to my target language, I have to open it, get a restricted non-movabe non-resizeable miniature window filled with data in a superlarge font, have to scroll to my target language inside one of its sections which sometimes requires to scroll the browser window so as to make this part visible at all, select my target language from the list, if it is there, and remember that I must not accidentally hit the "save translation" button. This only works, because I have set my target language as a support language in my preferences. Usually, one deos not do that and thus cannot get to the translations to ones own languages from the search result list. But that was my initial target of interest, remember?

I stop here.

Suggestions:

1. have a "search for" box
   • possibly have a "case sensitive" checkbox
   • have a search type selection "match all words", "match any word", "string match, "regular expression match", "search in message keys"
2. have a "restrict search to message group(s)" multiselect list (with a choice "all")
3. have a "restrict search to language(s)" multiselect list (with choices: "any" and "support languages")
4. have a "show translations to language(s)" multiselect list (with choices: "any" and "support languages")

"search in message keys" needs to find int: references as well, word searches must not do so.

I think what the above should do is pretty self-explanatory. I would not mind having two or three search steps

1. select search topic and type + submit
2. select restrictioins depending on what was found by an unrestricted search + submit, and
3. possibly an extra step to select wanted translations depending on what was found before.

Thank you for your feedback. Your feedback has helped me make better proposal for search translations. Your valuable feedback is always welcome. :)