[kde-guidelines] HIG for search needed (?)

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Tuesday 01 April 2014 09:47:36 Andrew Lake wrote:
> From a user perspective I think I can see some functional differences
> between search versus filtering, even in the same folder.
> 
> So let's say Jane has Dolphin open in her Documents folder. Let's say Jane
> has ~100 miscellaneous files there that have built up over the years. Jane
> also has under Documents several more structured folders with oodles of
> files as well for different projects over the years, travel expense reports
> and receipts.
> Jane thinks that the file she's looking for is one of those ~100
> miscellaneous files because that where she typically put documents that
> aren't project or travel expense related. She thinks the filename starts
> with "sta"  but isn't sure. So she opens the filter function on Dolphin and
> types "sta". What she expects is that out of ~100 files Dolphin shows in
> the Documents folder, some subset will be displayed with filenames starting
> with or containing "sta". She just wants to reduce the set of data that was
> already *visible* in Dolphin. She chose filter instead of search because
> she doesn't care about the 200 or so files in the Documents/Littlesburg
> Train Station project folder and its subfolders with "sta" in their
> filename, .
> 
> She's essentially just restricting her search to what is currently
> *visible* and not trying to recursively search the contents of the
> currently displayed Documents folder. She's still conceptually searching.
> But how she's searching, even in the current folder, is quite different. I
> do think we can still unify the presentation of say the search/filter text
> field. But we may need a way to offer the "just restrict my search to what
> is currently visible, without recursion" functionality that filter
> provides. Perhaps a search mode toggle of some sort. It might also
> ameliorate any understandable developer concerns about unifying search and
> filtering.

Oh sure, absolutely. I don't know what Philipp had in mind, but I was always 
thinking about "search in the current folder only" when I talked about a 
search that was the same as filtering for the user. That's currently not 
available in Dolphin's Search (presumably because it would be redundant with 
the filter function), but it could be.

> Separately, perhaps it might be worth distinguishing this pattern from a
> word/item-highlight search where the content isn't altered but the found
> items are simply highlighted and you can walk through each search "hit".

Absolutely. Usually you'll find a search which returns a list of items as a 
result in applications which allow you to browse through something.
Word highlight is usually found in applications where you either read or write 
text. And yes, they need different UIs
The third thing is a search for items which can also highlight the search term 
within the results (Kate's "Search and Replace" comes to mind), which should 
also be considered.

> P.S. I do think we should consider my sidebar search suggestion as a
> separate, maybe experimental, pattern to revisit at a later date after
> we've sorted out this basic search pattern.

A few days ago I head meant to write an email to this list (or maybe I have 
but can't find it anymore?) suggesting that we should split our ideas into 
both a search HIG and a pattern.
The search HIG would contain everything that we want to standardize, whereas 
the pattern would be more like an idea for how we think a good search feature 
could be implemented. So in my terms, your suggestion would be "work on the 
HIG first, then on the pattern later".