Hey all, As Jeremy mentioned, I think it's the best idea to drop this patch and use the default search utility of Nautilus.
For users --------- One of my main interests in the last 4 releases was to improve this situation, whether search doesn't replace the use cases of type ahead. We iterated on it and made several improvements: - Searches on the current folder are done with priority - Performance have been improved in several ways - Result of the current folder are clearly differentiated by not displaying the "Original Location" - We switch by default to list view when searching, so the locations or the file are clearly shown - We added a preference for permanently search recursively or only in the current folder. - The view used while searching can be changed independently of the default view when not searching. - Using tracker, search in most common folders is immediate. I believe all except one use case is covered in the current search, taking into account lag and performance too. The use case that is not covered is when the user wants to navigate to a folder that it's close to a name. For instance user wants "Pictures" folder and user searches for "Osomething", so most probably the next folder by alphabetical order is "Pictures". However I believe this is easily replaced by just searching for "Pictures" or "Osomething" and then right click -> open item location which opens the folder (it can be the current one) and selects the file, effectively replacing type ahead (again if tracker is enabled so lag is not an issue). We are still interested in evolving this more, and we are open to feedback and making the effort on improving the situation as long as it can fit, and doesn't clash, with our vision for search. For developers of Ubuntu ------------------------ The code on nautilus-window-slot and nautilus views is extremely delicate. You really need to understand all the interactions that happens under it to be able to modify the code expecting any reliability. Needless to say the patch that is currently used is missing this reliability, receiving crashes both in Ubuntu and upstream where we don't even know why this happen. Also this code has been refactored several times in the past, because it needed to, and it will be more refactored in the future. You will need to update the patch every release without exception, which I don't think is the best investment for Ubuntu if they are going to replace everything with Unity 8. So current situation is a lose-lose, trying to be as impartial as possible, I think using directly what upstream is using is the best solution for both parties, and even more in this part of the code. One thing to clarify, as Jeremy mentioned, this doesn't make sense without tracker, and if the decision is to not adopt tracker, I would recommend to keep the downstream patch. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to nautilus in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1666681 Title: Drop interactive_search.patch (type-ahead search) Status in nautilus package in Ubuntu: New Bug description: Nautilus dropped the popular type-ahead search feature years ago. Ubuntu has been carrying a patch to revert that change. See bug 1164016 for the original LP bug and patch proposal. Nautilus is now under very active development. During the 3.22 cycle, that patch needed to be rebased. I tried to do it and what I came up with caused a crash (it didn't really crash for me, but ricotz and some others experienced it) and the first letter typed activated type- ahead search but the first letter was dropped. In other words, you would need to type "ddow" to activate the Downloads folder instead of just "dow" like in previous releases. I did that rebase in October 2016 and no one has stepped up then to improve the patch. The Nautilus maintainer csoriano has said that the slots and views changed significantly during 3.22 and will likely be refactored more in the future. If there's no one available to maintain the patch, unfortunately, we'll eventually have to drop the patch to not be stuck on an ancient version of Nautilus. I am proposing that we do this at the start of the 17.10 development cycle. This gives 6 months for a developer to step up and try to fix the patch and 12 months before 18.04 LTS. Other Items =========== - For better performance with the built-in search, we need to reconsider avoiding tracker in Unity (LP: #1666676) - There is an option in Preferences for users to disable searching in subfolders. I don't think we want to do that by default but maybe it can help some people. The current Nautilus 3.24 packaging is in the GNOME3 Staging PPA with this patch now disabled. https://launchpad.net/~gnome3-team/+archive/ubuntu/gnome3-staging/+packages?field.series_filter=zesty To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/1666681/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
