Enable browsing in the Dash

[yman]

I see no reason why the Dash can't allow hierarchical navigation in addition to searching and filtering. It's not like displaying categories that the user can navigate into is going to interfere with the other functions. All you need to do is display in the "results" section a list of categories followed by results that don't fit in the categories. You can also elect to only display categories when not using the search, so they wouldn't crowd out the search results when users choose to search rather than browse. This would then allow lenses to organize their content in hierarchical fashion, so the apps lens can display a list of app categories instead of a disorganized mess which is the situation today. I sure hope you get this done before 12.04, because without this feature the Dash will simply look bad and be annoying to use, especially for people who don't like to type in search terms for each and every thing they may want to open.

There are other uses, such as navigating directories in the files and folders lens, organizing music into albums in the music lens, sorting mail into folders or conversations in a mail lens, and more.

[manny (estelar57)]

i agree better navigation and discoverability of installed apps should be implemented in the apps lens /dash.

breadcrumbs would be great too like in kde's menu

[Omer Akram (om26er)]

Thanks for your bug report. Your suggestions are welcome but the direction that unity is currently taking wont be changing soon but people are welcome to write custom lens for their need, there is a great example of such scope written a few weeks ago that implements something similar.

[yman (s-y-schwarz)]

@Omer Akram (om26er):
I wasn't aware at the time that a lens can do that. However, it would still be helpful if there was a less hackish way to implement things like back and forward buttons. That new Applications lens implemented them as items in the results, which doesn't look right. As to that lens, I should one day make an attempt to customize it by making it use the full category/sub-category hierarchy, but I never get around to stuff like that. IMO making the Application lens work like the USC would be best. Users would already know the expected behavior from the USC, which is that they can use search to search everything, or they can browse through a category hierarchy. In the same way I expect the File lens to work in a similar manner to a file manager. It doesn't have to have a 1 to 1 correspondence with the filesystem, but it should be a complete alien either. As I already pointed out, search & filter don't conflict with hierarchical navigation. Rather, the 2 complement each other.