Currently, using ctrl+F to search for ‘spell’ returns a list of all books found.
I find it somewhat tedious to search through each book to find out what spells they contain.
Wouldn’t it be better if searching ‘spell’ returned a list of all spells instead?
Selecting a spell could tell you which book it’s in, and where that book is.
I feel like I could be missing something about this question, but the basic answer: in modern crawl, if you pick up a spellbook, its contents will become part of your “spell library”, which you can access via M. This menu has a search function, among other things. For most players, there aren’t a lot of scenarios where they would need to find spells on the floor.
A list of spells available in shops could be useful though.
Rare is it that I feel the need to see every spell available in a shop on a single screen. I almost always end up looking to see if a single spell is available in a shop by just searching for the spell name, instead.