Nat, Trow?
What if Beagle would display a snippet of the document content along with the searched term? It could show the first match with a small snippet of content before and after - this way it might be faster to find the one you are looking for. No need to open each one to see what’s inside..?
Google does this for searches and it is pretty useful.
Yeah, that too. Or if one searches mail in Beagle, it might be useful to display the context of the searched term rather than the beginning of the mail.. Hm. Or would it make sense to show both?
“Hi Strass! I was thinking … foo bar blah [b][color=#FFCC66]beagle[/color][/b] blah foo bar…”
or something..?
It would be great if it hyperlinked gedit or relevant application to the file aswell (if it doesn’t already) so when you click your matched search you are taken to that row in the file in a gedit window. I don’t know if gedit support command-line parameters on which line it should have centered on startup… but it would be cool
I wanted to have something like this when I wrote the Tomboy indexer, though never got round to asking how easy it would be to get the context.
Thinking about it, as the Lucene backend doesn’t keep the full text of documents, each result would probably require a re-parse of the original document (slow and only available for local docs), or would require at least a full plain text copy of the document in the Lucene index (thus creating a massive index).
There has been some work on this in the original Lucene, but is not contained in the (abandoned?) Lucene.NET source.. hmm.