feature request: arbitrary text search in tarmac-browser

[pm215]

I'm playing around with tarmac-browser as an alternative to my traditional "just view the trace file with less" approach, and one feature I would really like is the ability to move around in the trace by arbitrary text search. In 'less' you can do this with:

• /pattern to search forwards
• ?pattern to search backwards
• n to repeat the previous search

This lets you do ad-hoc things like "find the first VLDR in the trace", or "find the last point in the trace where some register had the value 0x8080". (Less critically, it also means I don't have to get used to a different interface for "go to this PC", because /3901bd80 would then work for that just as it does in less.)

[statham-arm]

Well, /3901bd80 might work – or it might find you some other use of the same address, such as it being loaded as a function pointer shortly before the call, or included in a memcpy at some totally different time. (But then, perhaps you intended to find those too.)

But yes, I agree it would be useful not to have to step out of the tarmac-browser UI to do this. I expect I'd use it myself, e.g. for finding text-only events such as CPU exceptions.

I think this is the kind of feature somebody could write without needing a lot of knowledge of the existing code, because it wouldn't need much engagement with the Tarmac logic or the index-querying API. All you'd need to do would be to find the current file position (which is easy to find out as both a line number and a byte offset) and hand off to some completely separate new code that would do the search and return a new line number or byte position to jump the viewer to.

And we're already requiring C++14, so the standard C++ <regex> header ought to be available on all target platforms (including Windows).