Make Searching Easier
Hi all,
there are currently a few issues with Geary's Ctrl+s
conversation search, that hamper the search experience a lot, so the situation should be re-evaluated UX-wise. The
Current Situation
is, that
-
search results are not update after user interaction, see #188
-
Geary is searching for strings in the email body, but
- not in the sender name, see #1403 (closed)
- not in the mail subject line, see #1403 (closed)
- not in
Trash
, see #1388
This is UI wise not conveyed, leading to missed results.
-
type-ahead
search experience is nowadays a standard feature for GNOME apps, but lacking in Geary, see #489 -
searching for a string is not exact or too intelligent, resulting in too many false hits, see #657
-
searching is limited to one account, the last one clicked on the first pane. But this is UI wise not conveyed, and leads to missed results, see #1261 (closed)
-
the search results are not actionable, hampering seriously their usefulness, see #630 (closed), #1219, #1461 (closed)
An easy solution for a clean
Default Experience
could be
- provide up to date search results from email body + sender name + subject line and also trashed emails, simply search everything user accessible hierarchically
- type ahead search (after dropping single letter commands)
- filter exact strings (or exacter ones, like just one typo)
- search all accounts
alleviating things considerably.
Enhanced Searches
boil down to combining filters, so we need
- useful filter parameters, see #656
- a clean interface, #700
- saving filters, see #682
- autocompletiong, see #421
- integrate with a labelling system, see #673
Bonus points
- server side search, see #214
- filter for attachments, see #1016 (comment 947390)
- Enhanced Searches should be usable to allow sorting/grouping, see #85
Further Issues
related to searching/filtering:
- the search icons in Pane 2 and Pane 3 are the same, which is confusing, see #1451
- searching for 2+ strings highlights just the first, see #305, but that's not a UI problem and hasn't got a quick fix
- quitting search in Pane 2 affects the focus in Pane 1, disturbing the work flow, see #1063 (closed)
Remarks
- it is possible to search via
from: sender
for the sender already, but that feature is not discoverable and not very handy for a quick look-up