SoK idea: Improve krunner result displaying and navigation.

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Friday, April 29, 2011 00:21:11 Luiz Romário Santana Rios wrote:
> 2011/4/28 Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org>
> 
> > On Thursday, April 28, 2011 09:15:08 Luiz Romário Santana Rios wrote:
> > > Currently, when we type something in, krunner displays the results
> > > as it finds it, without giving a feedback of whether it is
> > > searching or just didn't find anything.
> > 
> > that would be a nice addition.
> > 
> > > It also does not separate the results into its different categories
> > 
> > that's because they are organized by relevance. if they are sorted into
> > categories, and if there are 4 categories that match and 5 items in each
> > category then the best match from the 4th category will be the 16th item
> > in the list(!) even though it is more likely to be what the user wants
> > than most
> > of the items above it.
> > 
> > i have yet to see a solution for this problem, but am open to such a
> > solution
> > being offered.
> 
> Well, I thought about showing only the most relevant results for each
> category and priorizing the category with the most relevant results. If a

which is almost always going to be the nepomuk search ;)

> user want to see more results for that category, they would just need to
> expand it. I'll do some mockups for that and will post here.

sounds good; mockups always help.

another thing that might work nicely is to show the favourite items launched 
by default so one doesn't even need to search to launch frequently used items.
 
> > > and shows some irrelevant results.
> > 
> > by definition, that is not possible. the results are precisely what the
> > runners say match. if the results are not relevant, the runner at fault
> > should
> > be improved.
> 
> Well, yes, but sometimes I'm looking for a file and a ton of Nepomuk stuff
> get in the way, for example. That may a problem with the runner, though.
> 
> But what I mean is that, sometimes, the exact match is not the most relevant
> result.

then the Nepomuk runner needs tweaking in how it rates results.

> > > My idea is to give the user a better feedback of what's happening,
> > 
> > telling
> > 
> > > them that krunner is searching or that it didn't find anything about
> > 
> > those
> > 
> > > terms.
> > 
> > would be nice, yes :)
> 
> I think krunner should, first, just execute the command by default, just
> showing the textbox, and, then, if the user waits a few seconds, all the
> runner results would start to show up. 

what would be the benefit of that?


> Also, if the user just stands in the
> front of krunner doing nothing, it would be nice to popup a "Type a command
> or a keyword" text.

that could be nice, yes.

> > > which one of these will contain the default action.
> > > 
> > > I also intend to make it possible for the user to navigate through
> > > the
> > > results using the arrow keys, instead of tabbing,
> > 
> > you already can. :) as long as the user has not been using the arrow
> > keys
> > to
> > back into the history, then you can just hit the down arrow to start
> > going through the entries.
> 
> Doesn't work for me. Is this in 4.6 or "trunk"?

4.6 and master, both.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks
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