GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 753102
Approximate string search for applications in activities search
Last modified: 2018-05-24 18:01:50 UTC
Many other search based applications launchers like kupfer or gnome-do support fuzzy search aka approximate string search. Lets say you have many applications that start the same way, for example icedove and iceweasel. And you start iceweasel so often that a search for "i", "ic" and "ice" all find iceweasel as the first result. If you want to start icedove, you have to write at least four characters to get a direct hit for the second "ice"-applications. In launchers that support fuzzy search you can type "dov" get an a direct hit. Which is much nicer when you need to start many applications that start with the same or similar sub string in a short time. In the FOSS ecosystem there are still many apps that are prefixed with few letters that indicate the desktop environment or toolkit.
The actual application search is implemented in GIO, reassigning.
Is that really "fuzzy"/"approximate" or is that just "substring" search?
Good question. My example is only about sub string search. And i would be satisfied if only that would be supported. I don't know the technical and UX implications of a fuzzy search. And i don't know if the implementation of both overlap. Fuzzy search would be a good feature for less precise typists but it might be confusing for some users. Just a quick look at different default launchers: * Windows 7 has neither * Cinnamon - sub string - no fuzzy * XFCE (Whiskers Menu) has sub string and fuzzy search. Example "gin" and "pdgin" = Pidgin * Unity no hit for Thunderbird when searched for bird, but when searched for "tunde". And gparted via "parted" and "garted" and "garteed". It is a bit inconsistent, i think fuzzyness only works a bit and only if you searched several times for the same application. If someone could test OSX's spotlight and Windows 8 and 10 that would be nice.
*** Bug 753957 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Tested on Windows 10: "Fire" → hit for Firefox "fox" → no hit "Firfox" → no hit (bold application name) but the application stay in the results and selection because there are no other apps starting with "Fir". (this might be a good feature to implement) "Manager" → Task-Manager, looks like they split names at special chars And sometimes a search with typo does not result in an application hit, but recommends a web search that corrected your typo. E.g. "twtter" returns a web search suggestion for "Twitter".
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