Quick Filter
One of the nice things in KMail is that you can quickly search for the correct mail with the Quick Search Bar. A problem I always have is that i’m not sure in which mailbox the mail is which I’m searching.
One of the annoying things in KMail is that changing folders resets the quick search bar, so you need to type in the keyword again to filter the messages and see if it is in that folder. Doing that in 10 folders is not real fun.
But I can understand why KMail does that. If you have a keyword and switch folders and don’t see any messages that makes you think KMail is broken and you might not realise a search is active. The search simply did not result in any messages matching the search.
With Mailody I’ve decided to go for another solution. As soon as you as you switch folders and have a search string in the quick filter bar, the thing flashes for a fraction of a second. Enough to get your attention and realise why you are not seeing all messages of that folder.
[img_assist|nid=129|title=QuickSearch Flashing|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=549|height=151]
Yeah, there are more ways to do it. You can also show all the results first, then flash and filter out the non-matching messages. But that’s a bit resource unfriendly. Pressing a button to activate it seems wrong, now you quickly click ten mailboxes where the message could be and find the message instantly.
Just be smart and make it possible to search in “All directories/accounts” or “This directory/account”. Watch how Evolution (you know, that gn*mie thing) does this.
quick search is quick search per folder, not the general search for all folders.
Why have 2 searches (like this) if all can be in 1 box so you don’t have to waste screen real-estate ? Evolution’s search is also a “quick” or “as you type” search box.
I’m not sure how I want to implement that. The header view can contain message for which the body has not been fetched. So giving the user the illusion that it searches all the bodies is wrong.
I need to implement the search on the imap server. I think that is the best way to deal with it.
The KListViewSearchLineWidget does not return these figures directly, but that is not the biggest problem.
I only want to bring to the attention of the user that the results are filtered.
Hi Tom,
Did you consider using Strigi to let the quick filter filter on mail body too. It’s just as fast as the normal filter is on only the titles.
You can add Strigi functionality by including the lib at /trunk/playground/base/strigi/src/searchclient/qtdbus
Cheers,
Jos
Or why not add a label below the search result which shows a message like this:
There are another ## messages filtered out by this search
I know, that this is a bit more difficult to implement but it will also get the attention of people who come back to the PC after a while and don’t remember that they were searching.
I had that problem once with KMail and wondered why the mails were there again after a folder change.
Seems like a cool feature, this is something that really bugs me (now you mention it) about thunderbird which has the same behaviour as kmail.
An alternative I’ve thought about is keeping the text in the box but not applying it until you press a button (‘search’?)in each folder, but the difficulty here is making it clear whether the search term is on or off.
Another possibility is perhaps changing the background colour in the mail list when the search is activeas a constant but non-intrusive visual cue.