[another PATCH]: Kicker find as you type

[Fred Schaettgen]

On Tuesday, 3. May 2005 13:17, Dominik Seichter wrote:
> I changed your patch a little bit, to not only grayout non matching items,
> but to only show matching items.
..
> As you can see, the size of the KMenu is never changed. The problem which I
> see with this approach is that the hierachical structure is not shown to
> the user. Nontheless, I think this feel better than simply disabling
> certain submenus.
> Maybe one can show the structure in a tooltip.

That's definitely more efficient to use.
But showing the structure in a tooltip won't help much. Its much harder to 
translate a string like Debian/Apps/Programming/Kompare (an extreme example, 
I know) to mouse movements in the k-menu, as it was when you would see the 
exact position of the menu items during the search.

From playing around with my patch I noticed that there are usually only *very* 
few matches if you enter more than two characters. 

So what do you think about that:
- only gray out non-matching items
- submenus which contain a match get their label changed. If I search for 
"player", the "Multimedia" submenu item would change to "Audio player 
(amarok) etc.". The "etc." or "..." would only be appended if there is more 
than one match.
- Pressing enter on a submenu will open the will select the application that 
was displayed as an example. The name of the submenu will change back from 
the example name (amarok) to the old name (Multimedia).
- If a submenu contains only a single other submenu with matches, then this 
submenu will be opened instantly together with the outer submenu.

The result will be similar to your approach in that the names of the matches 
are displayed right in the main menu - but not more than one match per 
submenu. If a submenu contains several matches only the first match will be 
shown instead of the submenu name. Pressing "Enter" a few times for such a 
menu item will eventually launch that first matching application. 

So if you search for "amarok", the "mulitmedia" menu would change to "amarok". 
Then move down to "amarok" and press Enter, the menu containing amarok is 
opened and amarok is selected. Press enter a second time to start it. 
That's pressing enter one more time (or two for nested submenus) compared to 
the flat search result, but with the added benefit that you really know where 
it can be found.
Maybe next time you can't remember the name of the application, but you will 
remember the place where you found it.

> > Wish item: Include bookmarks into this search facility. If including
> > other areas of the menu, the search widget probably should be located
> > unter Actions.
>
> Bookmarks: It would be nice to search konquis bookmark menu using this
> method :).

Agreed, that would really make a lot of sense.

Fred

-- 
Fred Schaettgen
kde.sch at ttgen.net