Re: [Gimp-developer] Search Action dialog feature

[Jehan Pagès <jehan marmottard gmail com>]

Hi,

On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 12:47 PM, Michael Natterer <mitch gimp org> wrote:
> On Tue, 2014-01-21 at 00:10 +0100, peter sikking wrote:
>
> > 1) you say “action search tool.” is it not menu item search tool?
> > an _action_ search would search the toolbox tools, the layer
> > stack and all dockable dialogs too (the latter being super useful).
>
> "action" is meant as technical term here. A menu item is a view
> on an internal action, and they include:
>
> - all menu items
> - all tools
> - all menu-invokable dialogs
> - some esoteric stuff which we'd probably filter out to avoid confusion

Indeed.

> > 2) you say “natural language text,” the definition of which is
> > very wooly. similar as with ‘Text-based Intent driven Tool’ it
> > promises way too much (e.g. user types in “blown highlights” and
> > TITo responds with “burn tool”). you need to be very precise in
> > defining how sophisticated you want to be here (want to be, not
> > describing the actual bit you do right now).
>
> Please let's forget about the name "TITO", it was a bad choice
> to begin with.

Yes! Please all, stop saying "tito", especially if that confuses you.
TITO does not exist. This is an action search.

> This is about searching whatever text is associated
> with the action:
>
> - its name (as in technical name e.g. "file-open")
> - its label (e.g. "Open...")
> - its tooltip (e.g. "Open a file blah foo")
> - with a little effort all those things both in the
>   english original and the translated local language

Exactly! I don't think we search the technical name in the current
implementation though (usually words in the name as also in the label
and/or tooltip; also the technical name may not be appropriate and
won't be localized), but this can easily be done if someone really
thinks it may be needed. In any case, we search the label and the
tooltip. And localization already works. So if you have a French GIMP,
you won't search for "blur" but for "flou".

There is no "too much" intelligence, and I don't think there will be,
because that may mean too much work. There is still some minimum
processing and that works already quite good.

I only said "natural language" because the user can search with words
of one's chosen language, not technicalities: no shortcut, no menu, no
action name, just words. I did not mean any advanced natural language
processing technics.

So you can't get the burn tool with “blown highlights” because such
words are not in our description of the tool. But if you search
"darken" or "lighten" or even "darken light", the search will answer
with the burn tool.

> This is for initially finding the action, and this is the
> current state of affairs. Currently we are only talking about
> invoking the found action and should probably restrict the
> discussion to that, or it will get out of hand (like, let's
> not go into passing whatever parameters in that search entry)

I agree.

> However, what we IMO could talk about is having a little "help"
> button/icon in each row of the search results, for the case where
> searching "foo" gives you some results, and you'd rather look them
> up in help before applying them to your image.

That's an interesting proposition, indeed.

Jehan

P.S.: for Sven, I am on the road and have random internet access, so I
can't really meet on IRC meetings with certaincy. Email is the way to
go for now. :-)

> regards,
> --mitch