GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 619738
Please enable search-as-you-type functionality
Last modified: 2012-06-20 20:31:19 UTC
The search-as-you-type functionality (eg. as provided by Nautilus, where you can just type ahead and the relevant file will get selected) is currently disabled. Can we please enable this; is there some problem why it isn't available? It makes it much more enjoyable to use file-roller with the keyboard, as I can navigate through the directory structure pressing the initial letter of a directory and then "enter" to open it.
Created attachment 162035 [details] [review] Enable search
Yes please! Every now and then I open an archive I start to type until I realize that file-roller doesn't have type-ahead find. It had been enabled until the following commit changed it to FALSE: commit 6937ea77d7a4e6016648d7ac397b65fa17b9a23a Author: Paolo Bacchilega Date: Wed Jan 9 15:56:13 2008 +0000 Second batch of changes for the find/filter bar.
it has been disabled because the filter bar is more powerful, allowing the user to search in the subfolders as well.
Sure, the filter bar is nice, but it requires some extra keystrokes and is for a different use case: Show me only the files in the archive that start with the given string (and start searching as soon as I have pressed enter). The use case of search-as-you-type: Jump to the file/directory in the current directory, but still show me the surrounding files. Why not enable both? At the moment, typing just does nothing.
I agree, that is no excuse to disable the type-complete style of searching. They are two different use cases! Find (search) and "select what you're typing" are clearly different use cases. This used to work in older versions of file-roller and disabling it is a very archaic design decision.
This feature has been added in the development version. It will be available in the next major software release. Thank you for your bug report.