What some applications that don't like the Microsoft approach do is close the Find dialog after each search. Note how this addresses both my and svofski's issues. No need for Esc and Ctrl+F lets you search again. The downside is that searching repeatedly is less intuitive (whether with the keyboard or especially the mouse). That's why Microsoft does it the way it does. Altera's idea of zooming to the text while not closing the Find dialog is the worst of both worlds. (Note: closing the find dialog and going to the text is very slightly more efficient of the two methods. But it's at the cost of much more inefficiency when people don't realize what F3 is for.)