Thanks for the kind words, Francisco! And also for taking the time to get SearchBar working on Python3 and giving it a try.

I agree that SearchBar is a huge improvement over IDLE's simple find and replace dialogs. And by now every potential user is used to such search interfaces, whereas search dialogs are a thing of the past.

Regarding your suggestion to split the buttons into a separate line, that would make problems with the replace mode. In the replace mode there are two bars, the first of which is the regular search bar. By adding another bar for controls, that would mean having three bars, and it would be non-obvious to users whether the option refer to the find or replace bar.

Also, we must be careful not to add many options and controls to the interface, and this is the first time someone has asked to be able to toggle search hit highlighting. If this comes up repeatedly I will consider it.