services runner matching categories

Jacopo De Simoi wilderkde at gmail.com
Mon Jan 11 01:07:44 CET 2010


Dear plasma-devs

   After finally upgrading to 4.4 I noticed that the service runner started matching app categories; (the commit indeed happened ~6 months ago)
 which can be very handy for specific (i.e. single runner, plasma-netbook) queries, but might be imho a bit confusing in krunner common usage; the main problem is that such matches are marked as ExactMatches, which brings them on top of the results.

An example:
typing "system" shows (in this order in my testcase)
Konsole: terminal
Dolphin: file manager
Yakuake: 	drop-down terminal
kdiskfree: show disk usage
....
wireshark: network analyzer
system settings
system notifications
system bell
system monitor
sweeper: system cleaner

That is, the first term containing the word "system" is in 12th position; all the previous ones do not show the word "system" at all.
To me this is rather confusing as imho even a partial match on an application name should match "better" than an exact match on the relative category.

I can see how to get around this in a couple of ways:
1) demote exact matches to partial matches to make application names "win"; this is not perfect, since some popular applications (such as konsole and dolphin) will quicly climb up the result order; 
2) (quite drastic, indeed), match categories only in single runner mode, although I don't know if this feature has been added for the specific case of populating menus in various parts of the workspace or was meant to be something more general. In this case it probably should have been added with an appropriate keywording (e.g. category=<whatever>).  I know it's too late to notice this. :(

Thoughts / comments?
Thanks
  --J


More information about the Plasma-devel mailing list