Re: [PATCH] – Improve typeahead matching algorithm

["Matthias Clasen" <matthias clasen gmail com>]

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 7:16 AM, Nelson Benítez León
<nbenitezl gmail com> wrote:
> Hi!, this is an updated patch for bug[1] about improving typeahead matching,
> it was a result of some discussion we had here[2], the patch does the
> following:
>
>  - Adds a "Find in this folder" item to the Edit menu, and clicking on it
> brings the typeahead search box.
>  - The typeahead on the icon view first tries to find a file that starts
> with what the user is typing, if that fails then looks for a file that has,
> in any part of the name, what the user is typing.
>  - The typeahead on the list view just has the last behaviour, that is,
> looks for the file that has in any part of the name, what the user is
> typing. We cant implement the full behaviour that icon view has because we
> are limited by the builting typeahead of the GtkTreeView. Although if this
> gets in nautilus I plan to make a patch for GtkTreeView so it do what we
> have in the icon view.
>
> Also, now that the typeahead is reachable through the ui, I would like to
> know your opinion about adding up and down arrows next to the search entry
> to go to next or previous match respectively, similar to the firefox
> typeahead search (press CTRL+F on firefox to see it).
>
> Also, I've added a byzanz screencast (525 KB) to the bug[1], so people that
> can't test the patch can see it in action.
>
> [1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=170352
> [2] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2006-February/msg00020.html
>

The typeahead implementation in the treeview initially had
substring-matching behaviour, but we reduced it to prefix matching,
since it turned out to be somewhat confusing, in particular since we
don't have the means to highlight the match.