Enable free-text mode automatically

[Jérôme Guelfucci]

It would be nice that if nothing more than "text matches" are found for a query, kupfer automatically switches to text mode..

Original Report:
It would be cool if it was possible to type several words in a kupfer query, particularly for web search or devhelp search (I guess it's useful for any kind of search). I know this "breaks" the current usage of the space key, but it would still be really useful.

[X (u78qir8a9-deactivatedaccount)]

You may enter "free-text" mode in Kupfer by pressing . (period) The reference to that and the other bazillion undiscoverable tricks in Kupfer is here: http://live.gnome.org/Kupfer/Tips

The same issue was also covered in this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/kupfer/+bug/461453

Shall we turn this bug into a Feature request: "Enable Text Mode Automatically"? It hasn't been implemented yet since there was no elegant way to solve it in the code. But perhaps it's soon time for that.

[Jérôme Guelfucci (jerome-guelfucci-deactivatedaccount)]

Ok, thanks for the trick. Enabling text mode automatically would be a good idea, I find rather unexpected not to be able to type several words. Though, I don't really like how the current text mode "looks", the normal mode looks far better. Would it be possible to use the normal view in text mode, without displaying the text in another entry? In text mode, the bottom arrow could also be used to replace the features provided by the space key. I'm just throwing ideas, most of the blocks are here, they just need to be linked and set in an optimal way.

[X (u78qir8a9-deactivatedaccount)]

We need a large display for text in "free-text" mode, so that the user can see the whole text that is typed.. we don't have much place to show that in a view like the command mode. So far we are also only using original gtk Widgets for everything which saves us work thinging about a ton of stuff (Accessibility, international text, all gtk text entry keybindings, etc).

I'm not sure what you mean about the downarrow (↓) but it should already always do (in either mode) what the space bar does in command mode.

[Jérôme Guelfucci (jerome-guelfucci-deactivatedaccount)]

Yeah, I noticed that down arrow already works, that's nice.

Re the text area, I think it should be possible to implement some sort of ellipsizing (....rest of the text) or line breaking (the only issue being that the window would be resized which does not look really good). I just installed gnome-do to see how it handle this: as soon as space is pressed it creates an transparent text entry which covers the icon + text of command mode, this text entry has line breaking and displays the raw text.

For kupfer, this could be implemented by removing the icon in the left part if results are text only, and resizing the text entry for command so that it uses the whole container space. I don't know how hard it would be to have line breaking in the text entry though.

[X (u78qir8a9-deactivatedaccount)]

FYI, In kupfer's current git, there is now a blanket option to enable/disable the single-keystroke commans of the command mode (space, /, comma, period, = and.. maybe some more). If you disable this option, then those keys can be used for entering text directly from the command mode. All functionality is available even if you disable this, I have added an accelerator (by default not configured) for the comma trick.