xfce's settings manager has a few icons that lead to applications which have many various features in them, but unfortunately, searching for those particular features dont return the parent icon that the feature is held in. for example, i search for 'fonts', it will not display the appearances icon, though fonts is a tab in the appearances dialog. i'm assuming the search is reliant on xdg .desktop files, and think the keywords key can be utilized to improve the search. doing this will also help the xfce based whisker search menu found in distros like linux mint. i believe this suggestion would help not only the settings manager, but all the software that is part of xfce desktop, as well as software bundled with the xfce desktop.
Up until now only the title and comment field of the desktop files are being used to construct the search string. The reason seems to be that garcon (the menu library of Xfce) doesn't support keywords (yet) so you cannot even easily add this feature to the settings manager without patching garcon.
I was mistaken - garcon does have this feature (after reading the code), but it was undocumented: https://git.xfce.org/xfce/garcon/commit/?id=a54bb056c72d6c96a55b2dcf9625ce45d2351774
Simon Steinbeiss referenced this bugreport in commit 8f1c9f36cb79ec7ae128061cd5ab272d772cebcd settings-manager: Improve search by including keywords (Bug #10694) https://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-settings/commit?id=8f1c9f36cb79ec7ae128061cd5ab272d772cebcd
Looking forward to your patches for adding keywords to *actually* improve the search ;)
Created attachment 9501 patch for xfce4-settings repo The .desktop specification mentions a keywords key, which whisker menu already supports (bug 15047) and settings manager search presently don't.
I'm not sure if the redundancy of certain keywords really helps the search, e.g. "default fonts;font anti-aliasing;font hinting" Instead I'd go with nouns or single words like "fonts;anti-aliasing;hinting;" etc. But this is more my feeling - depends on how whiskermenu handles those keywords (don't have time to test right now). In the settings manager the case doesn't matter - does whiskermenu take those things into account? (e.g. HiDPI is probably not something everyone spells correctly at the first try)
I've mailed Graeme to see how the search in whisker is intending to work as it doesn't seem to work presently with Keywords or across the various searchable keys and hopefully with his answer we'll get to know if the redundancy is necessary or not. Tried your patch and it brings up things in the keywords key quite well, but fails when the search includes things from across the multiple searchable strings. For example 'desktop theme' resulted in no results, though 'desktop' is in the comment key and 'theme' is in the keywords key of Appearance. So ideally all three need to merged together and searched together as if it were a single string.
Well those keyword items will never really work like natural language search and I'm a little hesitant to touch the existing search/matching algorithm (string stuff isn't much fun in C). I'd still go with single words because just typing in "font" will leave you with one item only (at least on my system) and I wouldn't want to encourage users to try to type in multiple words anyway - you can check your installed apps in /usr/share/applications or your $HOME, but almost none of mine has multiple words as one keyword... Examples: - mate-calculator: "calculator,MATE,scientifc,arithmetic,financial,calculations" - Firefox: "Internet;WWW;Browser;Web;Explorer" Please don't forget that these keywords will also have to be translated.
Created attachment 9507 Keywords key with single word keywords For me, the only ones with two word keywords were simple screen recorder and the libreoffice apps - simplescreenrecorder: "screen recorder;screencast;live streaming;" - libreoffice-writer: "Keywords=Text;Letter;Fax;Document;OpenDocument Text;Microsoft Word;Microsoft Works;Lotus WordPro;OpenOffice Writer;CV;odt;doc;docx;rtf;" So i guess we can just to the single word keywords and see how well it works and adjust accordingly.
Sorry to paddle back half a notch after reading that patch. So I think we're on the right track, but some of the words which don't make much sense without each other should probably still be *one* keyword (like "open;with;" or "double;click;"). Thanks for your effort!
Created attachment 9508 minor tweaks
Yousuf Philips referenced this bugreport in commit 477094089d35d8619d074feb8cf87fa8c52a0897 Add keywords to .desktop files (Bug #10694) https://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-settings/commit?id=477094089d35d8619d074feb8cf87fa8c52a0897
Created attachment 9513 patch for xfdesktop
Created attachment 9514 patch for xfce4-session
Created attachment 9515 patch for xfce4-power-manager
Created attachment 9516 patch for xfce4-panel
Created attachment 9517 patch for missing semicolon in xfce4-settings
Created attachment 9520 patch for xfce4-appfinder
Created attachment 9526 patch for xfwm
Created attachment 9531 patch for thunar
Simon Steinbeiss referenced this bugreport in commit 03e2e126003320f35f5bf3b8920a2cde949ff015 settings: Add keywords for discoverability (Bug #10694) https://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-session/commit?id=03e2e126003320f35f5bf3b8920a2cde949ff015
Simon Steinbeiss referenced this bugreport in commit 8b9a2c51d21f66f495c25a4fedd9e08ec8c0e409 settings: Add keywords for discoverability (Bug #10694) https://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-power-manager/commit?id=8b9a2c51d21f66f495c25a4fedd9e08ec8c0e409
Simon Steinbeiss referenced this bugreport in commit a39e549a1b2e52cbf96dcbc30d621779e13a2720 settings: Add keywords for discoverability (Bug #10694) https://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-panel/commit?id=a39e549a1b2e52cbf96dcbc30d621779e13a2720
So I reviewed your patches, fixed some mistakes and reduced the amount of keywords to a meaningful minimum (things like "size", "width" etc seemed far too generic and things like "display" seemed misleading for the power manager). I pushed those that belong to components I feel responsible for but I would ask you to create individual reports for the remaining patches so that the individual maintainers of those components see them and can review them. Consequently I'm closing this report. Thanks!
(In reply to Jay Philips from comment #17) > Created attachment 9517 > patch for missing semicolon in xfce4-settings Please send this patch in.
That's exactly why one bugreport should always only concern itself with one component - it becomes easy to overlook stuff :) Anyway, I fixed the missing semicolons and also marked them as translateable.
Thanks. I've filed bug reports for the others. :D
Simon can you confirm that all of the patches were also pushed into 4.14.
No. I generally try to limit the backporting to things that are bugfix, not features. Features mean you have to take much more care, wait for translations etc. I'd rather focus on getting 4.16 out sooner than we did with 4.14.
Beyond the welcome keywords addition, it would be great if the search would also match on names/comments in other languages (f.e. for the enabled locales) ..
(In reply to Marcel Partap from comment #30) > Beyond the welcome keywords addition, it would be great if the search would > also match on names/comments in other languages (f.e. for the enabled > locales) .. Don't think its a good idea to match multiple locales. What would be your argument of why its good to have this option.
*** Bug 14745 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***