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Type ahead find wildcards

Posted: 28 Dec 2016 05:47
by Millzey
I use Type Ahead Find probably 20000 times a day, and many many times it fails to find what I'm searching for. Most often I search for a 2-3 word phrase, and that is where the problem arises.

If the filename has underscores, dashes, etc, it wont find a match. So if I search for "My File", it wont find "My_File". I figured I could use a ? or * as wildcard for spaces in the phrase, or a regex by prefixing with > but it didnt work. An tweak to allow spaces to match anything would be great.

Re: Type ahead find wildcards

Posted: 11 Jan 2017 17:38
by Jerry
Have you considered using the Live Filter Box instead?

Re: Type ahead find wildcards

Posted: 11 Jan 2017 21:03
by Millzey
The LFB encomasses many more keystrokes for consecutive searches

When quickly looking for matches, type-ahead is lightning efficient because you dont have to focus the filter box, focus the pane, or clear the filter to get the list back, plus the match is already selected. They only keystrokes needed are a hotkey for "next match" or Ctrl-V for pasting the keyword(s) from clipboard. I do use the visual filter when I expect a plentiful match, and sometimes selection filter (both which also suffer the same ability to do keyword based search).

What I need to find is cloudy-day, cloudy_day, cloudy day, cloudy2day, etc without always having to wildcard the spaces or enable regex mode, which makes pasting from clipboard useless.

I would have to a search of *cloudy*day* or do a regex >cloudy.*day. Sure there's a workaround of you're an autohotkey poweruser and make a script to workaround this but it seems like much to do

if there was an option for Type Ahead find that translates a space into a wildcard (a more keyword based search) it would make it 10 times more useful - and even better would be matches out of order (day cloudy, day2day2cloudy)

Re: Type ahead find wildcards

Posted: 11 Jan 2017 22:12
by Jerry
I used to use the Type-Ahead a lot myself, and the next/prev shortcuts, but when the long-awaited LFB came around, I switched. But I do see your point. What about if Don provided an option that puts you immediately into the LFB upon typing, instead of invoking Type-Ahead? I think I would like that a lot, actually. It IS a bit cumbersome to switch between the LFB box and the list. I am always filtering.

Re: Type ahead find wildcards

Posted: 17 Jan 2017 14:05
by kinook
Millzey wrote:The LFB encomasses many more keystrokes for consecutive searches

When quickly looking for matches, type-ahead is lightning efficient because you dont have to focus the filter box, focus the pane, or clear the filter to get the list back, plus the match is already selected. They only keystrokes needed are a hotkey for "next match" or Ctrl-V for pasting the keyword(s) from clipboard. I do use the visual filter when I expect a plentiful match, and sometimes selection filter (both which also suffer the same ability to do keyword based search).

What I need to find is cloudy-day, cloudy_day, cloudy day, cloudy2day, etc without always having to wildcard the spaces or enable regex mode, which makes pasting from clipboard useless.

I would have to a search of *cloudy*day* or do a regex >cloudy.*day. Sure there's a workaround of you're an autohotkey poweruser and make a script to workaround this but it seems like much to do

if there was an option for Type Ahead find that translates a space into a wildcard (a more keyword based search) it would make it 10 times more useful - and even better would be matches out of order (day cloudy, day2day2cloudy)
+1. Could also use this to filter on part of a filename and extension. Would be very handy.

Re: Type ahead find wildcards

Posted: 17 Jan 2017 14:45
by admin
I made some experiments but it turned out too hairy. The related code is already very complex. This addition would make it explode.