Heavy flickering / refreshing of the view during search as you type
As of recent versions, including Nautilus 46 and the current nightly / git main
version, Nautilus constantly rebuilds/refreshes the search results view everytime you type a character, and this results in heavy flickering at certain typing speeds, as can be seen in the video below comparing Nautilus git (on the left) to another search utility (FSearch, on the right):
Nautilus_nightly_2024-04-22_search-as-you-type_flickering
Notes:
- This happens both in grid view and in listview. I only used the icons grid view in the video for artistic reasons.
- This was tested on a top-notch modern system
(NVMe SSD, 24 GB of RAM, Intel UHD Graphics 620 on Wayland, Intel i5-8350U×8 CPU)
at moderate/relaxed typing speeds (simulating what I've seen many people type at out there in the wild),
so it is not the result of a slow computer. - This was tested using the new "Search Everywhere" global search (Tracker-only search, no "Simple Search" bruteforce fallback), so any results are returned instantaneously by Tracker.
What we see here is presumably bad for performance (as the views at least seem to get torn down and rebuilt all the time?), but also probably an accessibility issue for people who may be prone to disorientation or seizures from flashing visuals.
Edited by Jeff Fortin