MX Package Installer - Allow for multiple keywords and or Regex in find field

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advice1010
Posts: 341
Joined: Tue Feb 21, 2023 3:50 pm

MX Package Installer - Allow for multiple keywords and or Regex in find field

#1 Post by advice1010 »

Making this suggestion because sometimes I noticed that it can be hard to narrow down packages that show up in filtered search results.
Not all time, obviously there are many great features provided to filter/narrow down results but sometimes filtered results can still be long lists to go through to find what you are looking for.

This could be based on how packages are named and also the words that are used in each items description.
These both can contain inconsistent naming and can be difficult if looking for a type of application where specific names are not known.

Say user is looking for an "Image Viewer" and would like to see all of them available in same list.
Some descriptions will use this exact wording but some may user "image-viewer" or "picture viewer" or "picture-viewer" with and without dashes. (Remember this is just an example)
Also Debian named libraries / dependencies such as "qt5" and "qt6"
Some use similar naming and then sometimes they change, which can make it hard to find specific packages.
Also if searching some applications also use "qt" in their naming / descriptions.

For now here are just a couple of suggestions to see if any developers/users are interested in the overall idea.

SUGGESTIONS
-Allow basic regular expressions to be used, really just "*" could be helpful
image*viewer
lib*qt or lib*qt*

-Tricky because I think field is more of a filter then a find but if possible maybe could allow ability to find more than one keyword at a time.
Something like "image;picture" or "image|picture"
Could also be tricky because sometimes there would be a benefit of this providing results for any items that contain words "image" and "picture"
but there also could be a use case where user would only want to see the result if both keywords are found (not one or the other)
if this makes sense.
Most likely the first result would be desired by more users then the only if both keywords are found option.

Anyways, just wondering if anyone would be interested in either of these suggestions mentioned.
Also there are more solutions for this but would probably require more coding.

Thank you to anyone who reads this

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Adrian
Developer
Posts: 9113
Joined: Wed Jul 12, 2006 1:42 am

Re: MX Package Installer - Allow for multiple keywords and or Regex in find field

#2 Post by Adrian »

New build 25.3 now allows * and ? wildcards in the search field. Won't implement anything fancier than that. If you somebody wants regex and stuff like that they need to use the terminal.

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Duliwi
Posts: 1178
Joined: Sun Jul 07, 2019 9:34 am

Re: MX Package Installer - Allow for multiple keywords and or Regex in find field

#3 Post by Duliwi »

New build 25.3 now allows * and ? wildcard
Cool. Thank you. This is also something I have missed.

advice1010
Posts: 341
Joined: Tue Feb 21, 2023 3:50 pm

Re: MX Package Installer - Allow for multiple keywords and or Regex in find field

#4 Post by advice1010 »

@Adrian
That is okay with me, just thank you for adding the regex update, I think that was the one to add out of the things that I had mentioned.
Thank you again for this update and also for updating the other items I have mentioned as well.

Ahh nice to hear that someone else will benefit from this, thank you for mentioning.

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