Behaviour of history and spaces in find/replace text boxes

[arspr]

Hi, a thread because I quite don't like the current behaviour of history in F&R tool.

But maybe, it's just me, so I prefer posting here the things I don't like so everyone can freely opine and if Kovid thinks in the same way modifying it.

• First: When you open the F&R tool there's no obvious way to call the history of typed entries. Would adding a drop down arrow in the right extreme of the text box possible?
• The worst thing IMO. But you can actually call the history by typing space. No problem about it BUT you lose the entries which begin with space.
• The last sentence is not really true, what you actually lose is the beginning spaces in that stored entries. And ending spaces are also lost.
• More over:   (in unicode flavour) are also erased.

I find this space-erasing behaviour quite bad because I frequently use spaces when looking for words (especially in Regex, and sometimes I use \s but other times I prefer directly typing a space). This space-erasing behaviour is quite dangerous for me because I am prone to make serious mistakes if I do not realize that my starting/ending spaces have been removed. (And it is specially dangerous with   ones).

So what do you think about this behaviour? Do you really like the way it currently works? Or would you prefer spaces being stored like any other character? (I VOTE for this last option)