Expose favorite folders to Overview search
Affected Version
- Version: 45.2.1
- Distribution: Nobara 39
- Also affects development version: Don't know, it wouldn't start
Use Cases
Hi. Thank you for your work! I mostly find Files to be a good file manager, but I miss better integration with the rest of the OS. At least with favorite folders. When I add folders as favorites that's because I often have to go to those folders. Thankfully it's very easy to add and remove favorites, so I can always have my most used folders there.
When these are the folders I use the most, that also means it's the ones I want to open the fastest. But if I have multiple folders with the same name, the search in Overview never cares about my favorites and it gives me the same order of results every time, and I have to navigate down past the folders I never open to get to the one I open all the time. And if I have multiple folders starting with the same letters, the Overview search does not guess that I want one of the favorite folders when I start typing, so I still have to type as many letters to find it as I would have to if it was not favorited.
Let's say I take a lot of screenshots and I want to look over them often and dragndrop the ones I need into something. Searching for "screenshot" in Overview only gives me search results from Files that are individual screenshot files, from years ago. If I have my folder named Screenshots in my favorites I would expect that to show up first. Just and example, there are tons of work situations where getting to some specific folders fast is advantageous. I'm sure that's why the fav feature exists at all.
Available Workarounds
There are extensions that can put a menu of folders in the top bar, I don't know if you can navigate them with keyboard only. Other than that it's just the way mentioned above, I think.
Difficulties
The usefulness of the Overview search is highly diminished. Instead of going directly from search to the folder I work with all the time I have to first open Files then either tab very far down the sidebar or move my hand to the mouse and click on the favorite folder. One thing is that this takes more time. Worse is that it seems so unintuitive and broken.
Suggested Enhancements
In addition to exposing fav folders in search it would also be nice if one could add specific folders (favs or not) to the Dash.
Thanks again for all you do, and for taking the time to listen!