KDE (vs GNOME)

[Robert Knight]

> Btw, has anybody actually thought of getting rid of the search dialog?

The best mail-search interface I have seen is GMail.  It has precisely
ONE text field into which you type a few words and press return to
perform a full-text search across all your mail.  This has the
advantages of being much quicker and easier to use than the
traditional 50-widget search box.

Apparently the newest KMail has experimental full-text indexing, so I
guess something like this would be possible in future.

On 11/13/05, Jakob Petsovits <jpetso at gmx.at> wrote:
> On Saturday 12 November 2005 19:15, Benjamin Meyer wrote:
> > On Saturday 12 November 2005 9:03 am, Martin Konold wrote:
> > > Am Freitag, 11. November 2005 22:49 schrieb Thiago Macieira:
> > >
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > > The virtual (search) folders in KMail are quite nice.
> > >
> > > They are unfortunately for real world use totally useless :-(
> > >
> > > The reason is that they use 100% CPU and 80% IO after the initial
> > > population. So e.g. having two search folders makes Kontact unusable.
> > >
> > > Regards,
> > > -- martin
> >
> > I was going to say that they are real world useless because to create new
> > search folders you have to do something completely different then what
> you
> > think you should do.  I think I should be able to right click, or click
> > some "add search folder", instead you have to open the Find Messages
> dialog
> > and after you create the search, *then* search and *then* rename the
> > "Search Folder Name" it magically appears in the folder listings.
>
> Btw, has anybody actually thought of getting rid of the search dialog?
> I mean, if you select the Search Results root folder, what do you get to
> see?
> A huge amount of free space a.k.a. KMail introduction.
> Perhaps this could be used to make searching more straightforward.
>
> My reasoning is:
> 1. When defining a search, you don't need to have your mail directly
> available
> 2. Less open windows make for a better overview
> 3. Let's get the search dialog into the main window!
>
> The only thing that has to be done is making sure that the search area isn't
>
> cut off by the window borders and has to be scrolled.
>
> Then, when you have pressed search, the search results show up like in a
> real
> folder, not in the "crappy" compromise search result list from the search
> dialog. That would make a search folder out of every search, and you can
> easily browse, filter, and what not, without the need of explicitly creating
>
> a search folder.
>
> The only thing that would be different are two additional buttons, namely:
> - Refine Search, and
> - Close Search Results
> where the former returns to the search area and the latter
> deletes the search folder and returns to where the user originally came
> from.
>
> Would that be an appropriate solution for search folder ease of use?
> (Of course, stuff like CPU overhead is not addressed here.)
>
> 'xcuse me for not holding back, I just had to write that now.
>
>
> P.S.: When KMail is done, I could as well extend my dialog-in-mainwindow
> approach to configuration dialogs, other KDE apps, and what not...
>