Select file/folder as you type, even if content is not fully processed yet

added 2. Enhancement 5. Searching labels

Hey I am trying to work on this, but I can't seem to find a good starting point to trace the issue. Need some guidance please

Phew, hard to reproduce this one. Created 10.000 files ( for i in {1..10000}; do touch "$i"; done ) and named one y .. but even than, I need to hit y real fast after opening the folder to trigger the bug.

Possibly simpler to reproduce on an flashdrive or remote.

For icon view the related code is in exo .. e.g. exo_icon_view_search_start. Though for icon-view I cannot reproduce the issue. (Can you?) For tree-view I did not find the related code :/ .. I think it is a gtk build-in feature for tree-views .. see gtk_tree_view_set_enable_search.

So if it is only a matter for tree-view, we need to file the bug on the gtk issuetracker.

@alexxcons

Created 10.000 files ( for i in {1..10000}; do touch "$i"; done ) and named one y .. but even than, I need to hit y real fast after opening the folder to trigger the bug.

I tried reproducing this issue with a remote ssh folder mounted using the command sshfs -o sync_readdir,max_read=1 remote_image_folder /tmp/localimages and I noticed that one is unable to attempt a search while the folder is loading. Typeahead doesn't show any dialog, nor does Ctrl+F.

The trick I found to reproducing this issue is to create the files slowly, and being able to search for a file within the 5 seconds timeout of the search dialog appearing. I used the following code to reproduce the issue:

for i in {1..10}; do 
  echo "$i" > "${i}_file"
  sleep 2
done

Now you just need to type in a number, and as long as you typed it within 5 seconds of the file appearing, you will observe that the file is not selected as a match. This is reproducible in both treeview and iconview.

Possible solution(s)

My first instinct is to listen for the start-interactive-search event (if possible), then making use of the files-added event, we can check if a new file is created while the interactive search is not timed out or dismissed by the user, then tell exo to repeat the search.

The following issues immediately arise (for me atleast):

I see no corresponding stop-interacative-search event, to know when the search is done i.e. user dismissed the dialog or timed out.
There doesn't exist an API for manually informing exo to do a search (maybe we can create one?)
On systems like Archlinux, the /tmp folder is used a lot by many programs and files are created and destroyed very rapidly from that folder. I've personally witnessed this: 20+ files in less than a second. Now if we find a way to tell exo to repeat a search, then searching in the /tmp folder becomes potentially expensive because each time a new file is created before the search dialog is dismissed, we repeat the search, and this could go on forever.

A solution to the last part might be to only repeat the search for as long as the search dialog is active i.e. exo should not extend the timeout for this dialog when we do the manual search

Another option could be to move all of this searching to exo itself. From what I've seen so far, exo seems to be the driver of the search anyways. So why not simply have exo detect if a new file was added to the underlying model, and then repeat the current search when this occurs.

For icon view the related code is in exo .. e.g. exo_icon_view_search_start. Though for icon-view I cannot reproduce the issue. (Can you?) For tree-view I did not find the related code :/ .. I think it is a gtk build-in feature for tree-views .. see gtk_tree_view_set_enable_search.

Yea both icon view and tree view make use of the start-interactive-search (gtktreeview::start-interactive-search, exoiconview::-start-interactive-search) event to trigger the search, but like I said before, they don't have a corresponding stop-* method.

What are your thoughts on how we should proceed?

First of all, I would not want to add too much additional code/complexity to fix this bug. I suppose it is a border-case which does not happen that often.

Though if we can do it in an easy way, than fine for me !

Each folder which is opened within thunar is watched for changes on that folder within thunar_folder_monitor. Possibly exo_icon_view_search_start could be called on such changes .. or can we emmit some signal to re-trigger the search? (only taking effect if the box is open).

iirc, thunar_window_notify_loading could as well be an entry point to listen on changes in a folder.

@alexxcons Alright I had some time yesterday and today to think about this. The plan is to create new signals (search-in-progress, search-concluded) in exo that will be used to inform anyone interested when a search is in progress and when it stops.

These are the patches: exo-tree-view.c.patch exo-icon-view.c.patch

In order to get around the lack of exo_tree_view_search_start and exo_tree_view_search_dialog_hide, I use the focus-{in,out}-event's to implement something similar in ExoTreeView.

Thank you for looking int it !

The plan is to create new signals (search-in-progress, search-concluded) in exo that will be used to inform anyone interested when a search is in progress and when it stops.

But with only that, the bug will not be fixed. Where and how you plan to use these signals in thunar ?

For review and testing later on, it would be nice to have two merge requests in the end, one for exo and one for thunar

mentioned in merge request !107 (closed)

mentioned in merge request exo!39 (closed)

@alexxcons I'm running into a problem with this. When I added the entry to ExoTreeView, the search entry doesn't show up any more.

My guess is that because I didn't override the dispose method, the object lifecycle is not taken care of. Or is it because it wasn't attached to a window like what we do in ExoIconView? What do you think of this?

Sorry, no idea :) I dont have the time to look into that in detail myself currently. Best just do some trial & error to figure out what is going on.

If you want help on concrete code-changes, it is always good to refer to specific lines in a MR or place a patch, to see about which changes exactly you are talking about.

mentioned in issue #1340

mentioned in issue #1529 (closed)

mentioned in issue #1585 (closed)

Select file/folder as you type, even if content is not fully processed yet

Submitted by HennR

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