unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jo-Erlend Schinstad <joerlend.schinstad@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks Ted!

What you express, is exactly what I want. I wouldn't want to _replace_ 
that with tab completion. I realize I expressed myself somewhat poorly 
in the original email. It's not that easy to provide a precise 
description of something you've never seen. :)
I have the same goal as you do. However, when I do it the way you 
suggest, the resulting search takes about one minute to complete. It's 
not a wild exaggeration. Sometimes, perhaps it's closer to 50 seconds, 
or even 45, but it really takes a very long time to complete, which 
makes it less useful. I'm sure there are improvements to be made in that 
area, but improving algorithms will never be as effective as limiting 
the amount of data you have to search to begin with – except doing both.
I was thinking more along the lines of using tab completion to complete 
the search and narrow when it finds the right result, and then being 
able to expand on it. So, I'd enter "guit", then wait for it to find "My 
guitar effects studio" and press tab to lock onto that result. Then, 
when I enter "test run", it will only search its descendants, which 
would speed up the search. But then you have the situations when I know 
the exact "title path". Why should it be necessary to perform a deep 
search at all?
I don't know exactly how the search works now, but I imagine it begins 
at the root and simply walks the tree, performing extra searches on each 
node. Then, if I know the exact path, I'd enter "pr" and press tab. It 
would only have to search the top-level menu titles in the focused 
window, and the names of the active indicators. The tab would indicate 
that I'm looking for a precise title, so searching through things like 
tooltips and synonyms would be unnecessary. It would very quickly find 
the Projects menu, complete my search phrase and stop searching. I then 
enter "my g" and press tab. It will only search the Projects menu and 
not indicators and other menus structures. I think that's what most 
people would expect from tab completion, so I don't think that'd disturb 
anything. Even when using tab completion, you should be able to skip 
parts of the path.
Did that make more sense? :)


--
Jo-Erlend Schinstad