[unity8] searching in app drawer with a lot of apps can make you type a lot

[dinamic]

ubuntu 17.04 unity8
[unity8] searching in app drawer with a lot of apps can make you type a lot

so, now i have a lot of apps in the app drawer and i'm trying to find screencastrecorder

i have to type 4 letter before i see what i'm looking for.

if i type "s", i get a lot of things that i'm not looking for A,B,C,D,E.. etc S is not even in the screen, same with "se"

see screenshots

so yeah, have a lot of apps installed, if you can the all Alphabet, search for stuff, see how long it takes to find what you are looking for

[Michael Zanetti (mzanetti)]

so right now, it searches for the application's name and keywords (from the .desktop file) to contain the search string... This seems to make sense to me...

what would you suggest how searching should behave?

[Michał Sawicz (saviq)]

I suppose we could prioritize the results that *begin* with the search string.

If we keep the alphabetical split, we'd need a separate section at the top or so.

[dinamic (dinamic6661)]

also if i search for a substring it doesn't seem to find anything, search "imple"

@mzanetti not sure, maybe something like @saviq

in unity7/dash i only need to type "s" to see SimpleScreenRecorder in the screen and "si" to be the first match, buh in unity8 is with alphabet and stuff

it's nothing wrong with the search as it is now, it's just more typing than on unity7

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

It appears that we match word prefixes only (which is arguably a good choice): "ath" does not find "LibreOffice Math", but "math" does. However there are some cases where U8's implementation is annoying.

Example: Search "si"
Unity7 returns: "Simple Scan", "Universal Access", "Disk Usage Analyzer", "Passwords and Keys".
Unity8 returns: "P: Password...", "S: Simple Scan", "U: Universal..."

So Unity7 is returning the more useful result first, but it's still not perfect. I would have said the perfect answer would be to only return "Simple Scan" for "si". If we did that then the alphabetical split would not matter (only one result returned).