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Fuzzy search not working as intended.

Open markrian opened this issue 1 year ago • 9 comments
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Is your feature request related to a problem?

Sometimes I can't remember exactly the name of an app or how it's spelled, so I would like to be able to enter some characters I know to be present in the name.

For example, I couldn't remember the first letter of "F-Droid", so I typed "droid", but no results came up.

This can also be useful for disambiguation. For instance, typing "pho" results in both the Photos and Phone apps showing up. To disambiguate, I'd have to type four characters. Instead, it'd be nice to be able to type "oto" to get Photos, or "one" for Phone.

Describe the solution you'd like

Fuzzy search, ideally with similar heuristics to fzf.

At least, searching a substring anywhere within the name, rather than just at the beginning.

Feature Request Procedure

markrian avatar Dec 04 '23 22:12 markrian

Another benefit of this is in implicit grouping. For instance, I could rename all the game apps to include "game", so that searching for "game" would show all the installed games.

markrian avatar Dec 04 '23 22:12 markrian

For what it's worth, this is the one thing keeping me from switching to this launcher permanently, over KISS Launcher.

markrian avatar Dec 04 '23 22:12 markrian

Okay, I now see https://github.com/8bitPit/Niagara-Issues/issues/411, particularly https://github.com/8bitPit/Niagara-Issues/issues/411#issuecomment-1819587146.

I'm running 1.10.2, and I'm not seeing any fuzzy search behaviour 🤔

markrian avatar Dec 04 '23 22:12 markrian

Hey there, and thank you for your report. Is the issue still occurring? The /refreshnames secret command may help here. If not, could you please provide additional information, including hardware details, if the issue persists?

NiagaraSupport avatar Dec 18 '23 16:12 NiagaraSupport

@NiagaraSupport I tried the secret command, and I saw it popped up a little tooltip/notification with the Niagara icon and a bulb, which I presume means it did its thing.

But, the problem persists. Well, partly! I can now type "droid" and F-Droid appears. But typing, say, "lend" does not make Calendar appear. The reason I do that is that "cal" makes the calculator appear first, which usually isn't what I want, so I'd rather some set of characters I know are unique to the app I'm looking for.

In other words, I'd like the functionality of https://kisslauncher.com/, but with the beauty of Niagara.

I doubt this will help, but I'm using a Fairphone 4 running Android 13, now using Niagara 1.10.6.

markrian avatar Dec 20 '23 10:12 markrian

@markrian We have reverted some of the search behavior. Now, it shows all apps whose names contain your query again (as long as the query is longer than 3 characters; if we allowed this behavior for shorter queries, almost all apps would match, leading to a worse search experience).

Thank you for linking the fzf project as well. We are going to take a look and see if it makes sense to implement a stronger fuzzy search.

TFackler avatar Mar 07 '24 13:03 TFackler