Allow fuzzy search in activities overview for applications
tl;dr; When searching for applications with the query fimp
or fierfox
or sttings
the activities overview should respond with gimp
or firefox
or settings
, currently you get "No Results". (furthermore simply missing the first character is enough for the result not to be found, eg irefox
won't find firefox
)
This is a feature I have greatly missed from Unity, it is quite easy for the user to accidentally miss a letter or press an incorrect letter when typing in the search field. I have even had a situation where the correct result has appeared while typing but I then hit one additional incorrect character and my result was lost!
In Unity a "fast online approximate matching library" called libcolumbus
[0] [1] was used to perform searches which return results that do not exactly match. This was added to the Unity code here [2] (if it helps for reference).
And they had a manual test case of
fimp -> Gimp
fierfox -> Firefox
sttings -> settings
It would be awesome if the activities overview in GNOME Shell could use the same or a similar library or method for searching applications, as it would greatly increase the chance and speed of finding an application.