GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 428568
better search
Last modified: 2009-08-19 01:59:07 UTC
Hello, At work, i am using MS explore which has a simple feature for searching file that can be started with F3 or the menu. It's very easy to use and the search dialog starts a search in the current directory. GNOME has a Places / search but it is not bound to nautilus. Therefor if i am browsing a directory and then want to search some files, i need to start the search tool and browse again to the directory where i am. I think it would be nice if nautilus had some menu entry / shortcut to start the search tool __within__ the current directory. Thanks.
CTRL + F ;) works fine for me. and that`s within the current directory
I'm stupid. Anyway, that CTRL+F is hard to find in the menu (why is it in Places ?). The search windows is ugly (WTH is that blue) and has far less possibility than Places->Search
It is also much slower : cold cache, it takes 3s to the Global Places->Search to find in my home directory the file CV -> ~/Documents/CV.odt where it takes 3.5 minutes to nautilus search. Worst, nautilus doesn't provide any feedback while searching. The cursor is busy and that's all.
And nautilus search is not incremental. As i said, i had to wait until nautilus scanned my whole disk to get any result. The global Places->Search is really nicer. Would it be possible to simply drop nautilus current search and use the global one instead ?
i was about to report a similar bug Current nautilus-search is not intuitive at all to me. It's too complicated and i'd like Nautilus to return to basics for a better user experience. I'll try to explain why (sorry for my not-so-good english) The concept itself is not good. Since Nautilus is there for browsing files and not for searching files, user expectation while making a search within Nautilus is to reveal a specific file in current folder. For instance, i'm browsing my ~/home/Pictures folder which is full of pictures and i would like to click on MyBirthday2009.jpg. I can sort files within current directory by names and go to M... files. But if i'm not sure if the file is named MyBirthday2009.jpg or Birthday2009.jpg, i would rather try to find the file by doing a search with "birthday" keyword and i expect Nautilus to point me out the good file within the current folder : Nautilus would keep on displaying current folder, placing the cursor in front of the requested file and highlighting it. Exactly like searching a word in a webpage displayed in my webbrowser. I don't expect Nautilus to scan all my directories to search files. That is a job for a searching application (gnome-search-tool or a GUI for Beagle/Tracker today, Zeitgeist tomorrow for instance). That dedicated application would have a dedicated and optimized GUI for searching and would sort files by types for instance (like spotlight http://www.inspectmygadget.com/wp-content/images/spotlight.jpg ). But having both "search within current directory" and "search within all directories" functionalities within Nautilus is confusing. It breaks the GUI consistency (=the window is supposed to display a directory). Moreover it prevents GNOME desktop to focus on a dedicated Search GUI. To sum up things : - Nautilus is there for browsing files. - Searching a file within current folder is an expected functionality of a file browser. - Searching a file anywhere on the hard drive is not an expected functionality of a file browser. Its confusing and it's not optimized. Let a dedicated application do that job. Thanks
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 325086 ***