zim-wiki team mailing list archive

[Pedro <pedro100@xxxxxxxxx>]

During the last 2-3 years there have been numerous improvements in so called
quick access features through keyboard shortcuts.
Many applications launchers showed up and many applications added such
features.

I think zim needs something on those lines too, Ctrl+shift+F does work, but
I think it can be improved.

We could use something like eclipse's Ctrl+shift+T (open type). Another
example is gedit's quick open plugin. There are many more examples.

These works the following way:
The user presses a keyboard shortcut and a window with a text field and a
list appears. As the user types, the list gets updated, if the user hits
enter, then the first entry (or the selected one) open and the dialog
closes. Up and down arrow keys can be used at any time to select an entry
other than the first one, but it's still possible to type at any time.

One of the reasons I haven't completely left tomboy, or gnome for that
matter, is precisely this feature. Tomboy, together with tracker and deskbar
applet make this possible. If I fire up deskbar-applet and type some word
which exists in the contents of some note, then that note will show up in
the list and I can open that note simply by pressing enter. No mouse usage
required at all.

This has been implemented partially to zim too as a kupfer plugin. But the
search is performed on page names only, it doesn't index the contents. Also,
the keyboard navigation is not as optimized, a few more key presses are
necessary.
It's my understanding that to be able to search through the contents will
most likely require a significant amount of resources. The deskbar-applet
relied on tracker for indexing. For gnome users this makes sense, if there's
an application whose job is to index data, other applications should
naturally take advantage of that. On the other hand zim has a rather varied
user base with users from many DEs and operative systems.
I haven't submit this as a feature request because I don't have a
clear idea of what I would prefer. Maybe after more people join the
discussion and throw in more ideas.

Right now there's jump to page (Ctrl+J) and search (ctrl+shift+F).
None of them offers a very quick way of opening a note:

With Ctrl+J one must enter the whole name of the note from the beginning,
including namespaces. If enter is pressed before the whole name in the text
box, a new page is created instead. For some people this is a good thing,
for those who just want to open a page it's frustrating.
I guess this could be a completely new feature with its own dialog, but
there's already two of them. Also, changing such things may break many
user's acquired workflows.

I, for one, believe changes could bring more benefit than troubles.