I am the man that arranges the blocks
Today I gave the final touches to a patch based upon the patch for search capabilities in the GtkFileChooser embeddable widget, adding the “Recently Used” shortcut:
there are still a few missing bits (the icon for the shortcut is one of them) but it’s already working remarkably well. I’ll work toward implementing what’s left in the next few days, while I also fix some of the warts of the search support.
Search support for the GtkFileChooser (#344785) landed in GTK+ trunk. It’s a patch written by Federico and updated by Matthias Clasen (I merely kept it in sync with trunk). The patch adds a private search engine abstraction object and three implementations, using libbeagle, libtracker and a simple file-tree-walking search. There’s no hard dependency on Beagle or Tracker: the libraries are opened using g_module_open() if they are found installed on your system, otherwise it’ll all fall back to the simple search backend (it’s the same solution used by Nautilus for its search support).
The file chooser now has a “Search” shortcut:
If you double click it, you’ll get a search pane:
Where you can search for “foo” and get the matching results:
Next stop: fix all the missing bits (#435343) and add a “Recently Used” shortcut showing the list of recently used files (bug #435342).
By the way: libbeagle has an incredibly nice API, whereas libtracker doesn’t. Please, Tracker developers: instead patching projects or writing a GTK+ widgets library which only new projects can use, focus on writing a nice, GObject-based API for all the existing projects out there. Pretty please, with the sugar on top.
VFS: Lennart, what you want is GVFS, which is being developed right now by alexl, has dropped the POSIX abstraction approach and it’s surely more portable than FUSE. And, most of all, has a sane API (for a change). For “sane API” I mean that I almost cried tears of joy when I saw the file monitoring interface – and I wasn’t the only one.
Ubuntu: so, it seems that Dell signed on with Canonical to provide Ubuntu on their desktops and laptops. Good for the community, GNOME, Linux and, obviously, good for Canonical. Mark Shuttleworth will be rich (again), and without even having to resort to the patent on the hand-cranked XML parser.