GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 580925
Better search bar for word searches
Last modified: 2009-05-20 23:18:15 UTC
Evolution's current UI for searching within a message sucks. - To the average user, Edit -> Find in Message does nothing. They don't notice the cursor being placed in the search entry, which is the only visible feedback. - The preview pane in the main window and the message viewing window have different search interfaces. - The search entry is far away from the other search controls in the preview pane. If you want to clear the search you have to reach all the way up to the top of the window. - The "Current Message" search scope is still shown when the preview pane is turned off. Granted, it's disabled. But it still feels awkward and I take that as a sign that it shouldn't be there. I rewrote the "Find in Message" search bar to more closely resemble Firefox, and to be consistent between the preview pane and the message window. I also broke it out of EMFormatHTMLDisplay as a standalone (possibly reusable) widget.
Created attachment 133677 [details] Message Window Search Bar Looks the same in the preview pane of the main window.
Created attachment 133678 [details] New icon for wrapped searches I stole this from Firefox. Put it under data/icons.
Created attachment 133679 [details] [review] Proposed patch
There's more I'd like to do with this once we start rendering mails as a vbox of HTML widgets instead of one big HTML widget with GtkHTMLEmbedded sections. Search-as-you-type (like in Firefox) would be really cool, but it's impractical right now because we'd have to redraw the entire message with every key press. Eventually we could just redraw the "text/*" parts, which should be fairly fast. In addition, I'd like to handle the "no matches found" case better, which is currently broken due to some kind of bug in ESearchingTokenizer. I'm not going to deal with that here. Ultimately I'd like for this case to work like Firefox too, where the entry background changes color and you get a "Phrase not found" message in the bar as you type.
Matt, on Embedded/VBox. I render Anjal with Webkit, and optionally with MozEmbed. Surely we can add GtkHTML to the list in a matter of few more lines. It does it by vbox. Needs good time for me to test & bugfix.
Great! I'm looking forward to that landing in Evolution.
Committed to master. http://git.gnome.org/cgit/evolution/commit/?id=5d12f06367a0939387381f66cea77766a873aea6