As I said in my original post, I fully understand why one does not search for a single letter of the alphabet in languages written using the Latin alphabet, and that is the reason you gave in this post. I also understand the case in one were to search for hiragana or katakana in Japanese as they are as frequent in Japanese as the letter “a” in English texts. However, I have Japanese and Chinese texts on my PC and need to search for non frequent characters from time to time – not like “的”, which is ubiquitous in both languages. I can’t, in fact, understand why anyone would want to search for characters like “的”. The reason I am searching for these characters is that I am making a database of characters for a PHP / MYSQL program that I am creating by using characters from children’s stories in these languages. Because I have these in their own unique folder, and because there are not hundreds of them, it does not take long doing a search like the one I’m suggesting. Anyway, I hope you will consider it. One way to program around this is to keep the default setting that you have in AnyText, but having a checkbox or menu option to override the default setting and allow for single Unicode character searches on a need to do basis. After such a search, the default setting could kick in again.
By the way, has anyone told you about the latest problem in AnyText? My previous version was done scanning my hard disks after a day or so, and I got a green arrow up in the upper right hand corner of the program. The current version of the program has been scanning my hard drives for several weeks now (I leave the program running 24/7) and informs me that my searches may not be reliable until it has finished. However, by doing spot check searches in the most remote parts of my drives AnyText does deliver correct results. This may be a bug in the program, whereby the background search does not inform the main program that has completed its analysis of my HDDs.
Anyway, I enjoy using the program despite all this and will contribute at Christmas time.
Best wishes