Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Konsole progress - Searching the history

The "Search History" feature has undergone some changes for Konsole / KDE 4. It now uses an incremental search bar in the same vein as Firefox.
Pressing Ctrl+Shift+F ( or using the menu item ) brings up the search bar. Typing in a search term jumps to the first match and highlights all matches in the currently active window. I have seen similar features introduced or improved in other KDE applications for KDE 4. Currently I believe they all use different implementations of the search bar. Ideally we could unify at least some of them.

As well as searching large blocks of text, this is a convenient way to highlight blocks of text on screen matching given patterns. Typical examples include highlighting errors in compiler output or matches for part of a file name.

Under the hood, the searching of large histories ( particularly when using unlimited history ) has been optimized. History saving now uses the ioslaves mechanism which allows saving over SSH, to remote FTP servers amongst others.

Screenshot of new history search (Please note there are some problems in this shot that I am aware of: Main menu items in the wrong order, 'Debug' menu item, not using the session name in the window title etc.)

It has been suggested that "History" should be renamed to "Scrollback" in KDE 4 to avoid confusion with the command history which is maintained by the shell program and typically accessed via the Up/Down arrows. Opinions on this would be welcome.

Other notes, in no particular order:
- Having received much feedback on my first Konsole post, I am using tabs as the navigation mechanism for the time being, unless I can resolve the problems with the other approaches. I also received some help on getting information about the foreground process in the session which I hope to use to enable more helpful tab titles by default.
- This work is being done in a separate branch as I mentioned earlier. Before merging back into trunk, I need to research/design/implement the new Konsole settings system and fix some outstanding issues with split views.

28 comments:

Anonymous said...

There are at least several KDE apps with incremental search now: at least konsole, kpdf and konqueror. Is the code shared somehow or duplicated?

Anonymous said...

This search bar is at least implemented by:
kate
and konversation

There is a quite famous bug to implement this in all applications (especially in konqueror, kmail and similars): bug #93439.

Please, please implement such a feature.

Anonymous said...

The search bar should indeed be unified.


> Having received much feedback on my first Konsole post, I am using tabs as the navigation mechanism for the time being, unless I can resolve the problems with the other approaches.

I did not comment on the the other post, but I'd be glad if the tabs would stay, too.


One thing missing, when using Konsole, is the possibility to open urls by clicking on them (and no, Klipper actions are not an alternative).

Marco Vimercati said...

Another idea for Konsole:
where a number is printed, is should be nice to have an automatic conversion of this number (dec to hex or binary..).
Maybe it can be done with a tooltip when mouse is over the number.
just an idea..but can be usefull for developers..

Anonymous said...

And what about making it smaller? If you just make the icons smaller it would help. (I don't know if you cared about this or someone already pointed out, but it looks strange that way)

Anonymous said...

yay! I <3 incremental search :) especially if it highlights all matches.. I guess I just want everything to behave like vim ;)

and yes, someone will definitely have to do something about the code duplication, before we end up with ten slightly different versions of this thing ;)

Anonymous said...

History vs. Scrollback: when I saw "search in history", first I thought it's something like a helper for: history | grep NN, or CTRL-R in BASH. (But one's personal opinion is not a reason to change a software. :-) )

Keep up the good work!

Regards,
Ferenc Veres

Anonymous said...

It has been suggested that "History" should be renamed to "Scrollback" in KDE 4 to avoid confusion with the command history which is maintained by the shell program and typically accessed via the Up/Down arrows. Opinions on this would be welcome.

I definitely agree with this idea, as I was confused about this until I just read your blog :-)
Now off to find out how to extend the length of the BASH history, which appears is what I need to change as the Konsole history is already set to unlimited but that, as your post implies, does not affect my bash history.
Thanks for the hint!

Anonymous said...

Interesting! :-)

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