If I'm trying to find something in a document to modify it slightly, I'll use Find to find it. If there's only two instances of the thing occurring, than I can just quickly manually fix it. If there's 200 instances though, then I know I either need to be more specific in my search or start writing some GREP. The problem is that I have no way of knowing how many times the thing I'm looking for occurs, and if it's a lot I would have to click through "Find Next" an unknown number of times. When replacing items, there is a pop-up that tells me how many items were changed, but it would nice to know that number before I hit "Replace."

This is also useful in catching mistakes, especially in cases where I made the change in all open documents, realize that my find+replace should not have caused 2,000 replacements, and now have to go into each document and ctrl+z.

If I have a similar issue in Microsoft Word and use Find, Word shows me in a side panel how many times the thing I searched for occurs in the document, and then I can make decisions on how best to proceed.

I don't think an entire side panel is necessary, but could you just add a line in the Find+Replace window or a pop-up that says "found 80 times" or whatever? Find+Replace has a pop-up that says how many items were replaced, but it would be helpful if I could know how many things I'm changing before I actually change it. If you think the pop-up would be annoying for every Find, maybe it could be an additional button next to "Find Next", like "Find How Many"? It would also be helpful if this highlighted every instance of the search in the document, but I'd settle for just a "found x times" message.