Remember most frequently used actions

[Lauri Kainulainen]

Using rev 365. One of the things I miss from Gnome Do is the ability to remember my favourite actions and present them first.

E.g. very often I use synapse to access ~/Downloads. I press super+space and type in "down". The first suggestion is "Shut Down" the next 22 options are files I've perhaps accessed once under ~/Downloads. So I end up moving down to the 23rd option and pressing enter.

All the matches that come up are valid, I'd just hope that my Synapse usage history would be factored in as well (as I'm more and more reliant on it every day :) )

[Boris Dayma (borisd13)]

+1

[Denis Prost (denis-prost)]

To me, that's a major feature to make synapse fully usable.

[Kao Dome (kaodome)]

I would like to see that implemented too, a priority queue of result would be very useful.

[Michal Hruby (mhr3)]

The Places category is now one keypress away which should solve this.

[Osmo Salomaa (otsaloma)]

> The Places category is now one keypress away which should solve this.

How does it solve this bug? Does Synapse now remember choices and prioritize alternatives based on past choices?

[Michal Hruby (mhr3)]

Right, we could do better here, folders are still not sorted based on usage, re-targeting...

[Osmo Salomaa (otsaloma)]

The reporter of this bug talked about accessing files and directories. The need for sorting is obviously greatest there, since people can have hundreds or thousands of files matching a short pattern. Nevertheless, prioritization based on usage should be useful for all kinds of things you can launch with synapse. For example, if you have applications "GNU Emacs 23" and "GNU Emacs Snapshot", you probably normally use one of those and want that to start if you type in "emacs".

I haven't tried any version past 0.2.6, but I got the impression you added a category, but didn't implement any prioritization. I'm suggesting you keep a record of four values: category, pattern, chosen, count. For example

Applications, "emacs", emacs-23.desktop, 3
Applications, "emacs", emacs-snapshot.desktop, 100

which would mean that after typing in "emacs" in the Applications category, 100 times I selected emacs-snapshot and 3 times emacs-23. This information would be used to order the dropdown list in all categories, with the All category including prioritization information also from specific categories. To limit the list from growing too big, you could add a fifth item to save: last used date and auto-purge oldest items if the list grows beyond a defined maximum size.

[Michal Hruby (mhr3)]

Synapse by design does not store any usage information itself, it relies on system-wide usage as logged by Zeitgeist. That way Synapse just works immediately without the need to teach it something yourself. Of course this brings some drawbacks, but the system-wide integration outweighs those imo.

Bottom line, what you want it to do should work since version 0.2.2 (maybe 0.2.4) if you have Zeitgeist installed. If not, please open a new bug, this one will keep track of sorting folders based on their usage.