Second Search Bar

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meteorquake
Posts: 497
Joined: Thu Dec 15, 2016 9:44 pm

Second Search Bar

Post by meteorquake »

One thing I would find useful, and presumably others, is an optional second searchbar ("bar2"), and searches would be a simple concatentation bar2 bar1
This is mainly because when focussed on tasks there's often a common base element to your searches that's not changing much whilst other elements change more frequently, and it helps to keep the two visually distinct, especially as you regularly have to click into the search to adjust it. For example, bar2 might provide the title for the window (currently nop: but hopefully a window title feature may come, e.g. wndtitle:, and even a taskbar icon adjuster, wndicon:) and a base folder and any other specifics such as media types. A sort of transitory/throwaway filter if you like, but unlike a filter useful to have its contents readily visible, editable and clearable.
In practice a second bar could be to the right of the normal one and sized to be rather smaller, and have its own x to clear its contents and history dropper.
In the longer run command-line launches and history could then perhaps cater for it in detail, but in the short run it would be quite handy to have some basic optional box there whose contents prefix the main search box contents to create the search string.
David
raccoon
Posts: 1017
Joined: Thu Oct 18, 2018 1:24 am

Re: Second Search Bar

Post by raccoon »

I think it would be nifty if search terms were wrapped inside of graphical bubbles to indicate their distinctness, much in the way web forum tagging creates bubbles, or the Windows Explorer address bar creates bubbles for each folder element in the path.
void
Developer
Posts: 16732
Joined: Fri Oct 16, 2009 11:31 pm

Re: Second Search Bar

Post by void »

An optional secondary search bar is on my TODO list.

I will consider search term bubbles.

Thank you for the suggestions.
meteorquake
Posts: 497
Joined: Thu Dec 15, 2016 9:44 pm

Re: Second Search Bar

Post by meteorquake »

To add to the bubble idea, it could be that different terms, or different categories of term, have optionally subtly different bubble colours, so a path-type criterion is one colour, file-type criterion another, meta-info another, column definition another, etc.
I think there's a choice to whether you colourise the keywords and brackets (like a syntax-colouring editor), and their values differently, or colourise the whole term (like a bubble or not). The advantage of the keyword-colouring might be that complex column expressions have their syntax nicely presented, whilst in most simple cases of the form keyword:value just seeing the keyword coloured is sufficient - and it could be that double-clicking the keyword or value would select the entire keyword or value rather than simply the alphanumeric word under the position double-clicked.
David
void
Developer
Posts: 16732
Joined: Fri Oct 16, 2009 11:31 pm

Re: Second Search Bar

Post by void »

I will consider colored bubble terms.

Thank you for the suggestions.
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