"Find all" through command in Sublime plugin?

Question

I thought it would be:

window.run_command("find_all", {"pattern": "a"})

to find all the "a" characters in the current buffer (I mean the same effect as using "find all" from the find panel; end up with a multi-selection of every "a" character in the buffer), but it just does nothing.

(I tested that replacing it with something like:

window.run_command("move", {"by": "lines", "forward": True})

does work, so I at least got the context for the code right.)

Answer 1

According to the Sublime Text 2 API docs (also the same in ST3), find() and find_all() are methods of sublime.View, so you should call them on a view, not on a window. Here's a sample plugin to search for and select all occurrences of python:

import sublime
import sublime_plugin


class HighlightPythonCommand(sublime_plugin.TextCommand):
    def run(self, edit):
        count = 0
        for rgn in self.view.find_all('python'):
            self.view.sel().add(rgn)
            count += 1

        sublime.status_message('Added ' + str(count) + ' regions.')

After saving it in your Packages/User directory, you can run it from the console (Ctrl`) using

view.run_command("highlight_python")

---

For searching for your ≡ character, try this version:

import sublime
import sublime_plugin


class HighlightTripleEqualsCommand(sublime_plugin.TextCommand):
    def run(self, edit):
        search = unichr(0x2261) # your character in hex
        self.view.sel().clear() # clear any existing selections - ideally we'd
                                # save them and reinstate them afterwards...
        count = 0
        for rgn in self.view.find_all(search):
            self.view.sel().add(rgn)
            count += 1

        sublime.status_message('Added ' + str(count) + ' regions.')