GNOME Shell and GNOME Software

The ever-awesome Matthias Clasen added a nice feature to GNOME Software a couple of weeks ago:
gnome-software-shell-search
It’ll be available in GNOME 3.12 in a few months time.

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hughsie

Richard has over 10 years of experience developing open source software. He is the maintainer of GNOME Software, PackageKit, GNOME Packagekit, GNOME Power Manager, GNOME Color Manager, colord, and UPower and also contributes to many other projects and opensource standards. Richard has three main areas of interest on the free desktop, color management, package management, and power management. Richard graduated a few years ago from the University of Surrey with a Masters in Electronics Engineering. He now works for Red Hat in the desktop group, and also manages a company selling open source calibration equipment. Richard's outside interests include taking photos and eating good food.

22 thoughts on “GNOME Shell and GNOME Software”

  2. The current screenshot could lead to some confusion.

    Is there a way to add a title/explanation? “Available applications” (and maybe another search provider higher up that is called “Installed applications”?)

    1. Sure, it just didn’t match on “tux”. If you type “super” it matches fine. Perhaps you can open a bug to supertuxkart and ask them to add the keyword “tux” to the .desktop file?

        1. It matches the prefix of each word in the app name, the app summary, the app description and any keywords. Substring matches return hundreds of applications for most of the simple queries.

  5. Hello, Richard! :)

    I know it’s outside of the topic but will there be (a future) possibility for GNOME Software to search software in all (including 3rd party) repositories which is installed on the system (e.g. RPMFusion)?
    Thanks :)

    1. It depends if RPMFusion wants to generate the metadata. I did a previous blog on how to do it, so it would be really easy for them to ship the needed data.

  6. About substring matching: I really loved the partial matching that GNOME Do offered, where e.g. “ffx” would match “firefox” and “thb” would match “thunderbird”. Any chance something like this could be added to GNOME Shell search, or is this type of matching to resource intensive?

  7. In GNOME Do, an input j would match all strings s such that the characters in j appeared in s in the same order. Hence, ffx matches FireFoX, thb matches THunderBird, stk matches SuperTuxKart. It sounds like it would lead to many false positives, but it really worked like a charm.

  8. Just wondering how this would integrate with distros like ArchLinux. Would search the AUR, would it need manual configuration to work properly…? Any thoughts on this?

    2. For all those requesting the GNOME Do pattern matching, it’s worth noting that the completion behaviour shouldn’t be unique to software installation, but should apply to Shell as a whole. That is, I shouldn’t be able to search for Firefox as “ffx”, install it, and then not have it accessible via the same search string.

  9. Any chance for this to be activated by a special string? For example, normal text typing would be like Gnome shell works now, but if we add a prefix, like ; or : before the query, then that query would work for the web and software search? I mean, this is great but people would probably like to have distinct functions for installed apps and apps to be installed (including me).

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