Bug 150811 - Support flags in Search Commands: whole-word, case-sensitive, regexp
Summary: Support flags in Search Commands: whole-word, case-sensitive, regexp
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: LibreOffice (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
7.5.0.0 alpha0+
Hardware: All All
: medium enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords: needsUXEval
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2022-09-05 21:12 UTC by Eyal Rozenberg
Modified: 2022-09-16 07:59 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

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Description Eyal Rozenberg 2022-09-05 21:12:49 UTC
By default, the Search Commands search is:

1. Case-insensitive
2. Not-whole-word
3. Not-by-regexp

However, the user may well want to search different.

The top of the Search Commands dialog should have buttons/toggles for these three options at least.
Comment 1 V Stuart Foote 2022-09-06 02:06:49 UTC
if the ICU regex libs can be put to use, then sure +1

Just don't think this needs to get too complicated--we're not interested in replacing functions of the os/DE just something fast and efficient for finding LO commands--and possibly look in the LibreOFfice MRU for content. Not much beyond that though...
Comment 2 Eyal Rozenberg 2022-09-06 06:49:59 UTC
(In reply to V Stuart Foote from comment #1)
> Just don't think this needs to get too complicated--we're not interested in
> replacing functions of the os/DE

I'm not sure I understand what you mean... just have a look at CLion's "Find Action". Or - the search dialog in the simplest of text editors. They all basically have this, it's not a big deal.
Comment 3 Heiko Tietze 2022-09-06 06:54:08 UTC
I dislike the idea to make a very simple but efficient interaction complex and clunky with very rarely needed functions. Do you have good use cases?
Comment 4 Tomaz Vajngerl 2022-09-06 11:54:13 UTC
Search needs to be improved, but I'm against adding search options.
Comment 5 Eyal Rozenberg 2022-09-06 18:26:25 UTC
(In reply to Tomaz Vajngerl from comment #4)
> Search needs to be improved

In what sense, then?

> but I'm against adding search options.

Why?
Comment 6 Eyal Rozenberg 2022-09-06 18:42:19 UTC
(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #3)
> I dislike the idea to make a very simple but efficient interaction complex
> and clunky with very rarely needed functions.

The simple and efficient interaction should not be affected, and even visually this could made unintrusive. Extreme example: Look at gedit's search box. Or how CLion's editor pane search has, at the end of the search box, three buttons which are easy to ignore if you're not looking for them.

> Do you have good use cases?

Maybe, you be the judge.

1. I can't figure out how many spaces LO uses in its menu-to-item separation. So should I search for "Format/Foo"? "Format / Foo"? "Format /  Foo"? No, I'll search for regexp "Format */ *Foo".
2. I want to search for a command which has the word Insert, but I don't just want to match the whole Insert menu. So I'll search for the regexp ".Insert".
3. I remember I saw a widget named the somethingbar. But it wasn't two words, it was in a single word. So with a regexp, I'd search for "[^ ]bar"; or with a case-sensitive search, I'd search for "bar" rather than "Bar".
4. I'm searching for a command involving a Style - but not multiple styles. With a whole-word search, I'll get only the Style results, not "Load styles from template", nor "table styles" etc.

However, as I consider these examples, I'm noticing the overall number of commands is... what, around 1000 or so? With that being the case, perhaps just a simple keyword search limits the result sufficiently.
Comment 7 QA Administrators 2022-09-07 03:59:37 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 8 Heiko Tietze 2022-09-15 06:20:08 UTC
We discussed the topic in the design meeting and decided that those use cases are far-fetched and the low number of items to find doesn't balance for the effort to implement (and handle) complex search pattern. => WF
Comment 9 Eyal Rozenberg 2022-09-16 07:59:51 UTC
(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #8)
> We discussed the topic in the design meeting and decided that those use
> cases are far-fetched and the low number of items to find doesn't balance
> for the effort to implement (and handle) complex search pattern. => WF

I didn't agree the use-cases are far-fetched, but did agree with WFM because the number of items we're searching is small. Just using a single word, or substring, reduces the list of items to 10 or less, after which point there's not much benefit in additional complex filtering.