GNOME 3.8 will offer a new search mechanism to the system (local + cloud) through the Shell Overview. While this work is not completed yet, it seems that has a lot of potential to become something really good.
The Search Providers enables us to pick the locations that the system will search for files, while there is also a transition how Shell displays the results; from the Grid View to a List View.
Search Providers
Search Providers are visible under our Settings -> Search Panel and we are now able to set Shell to search in the locations of our preference.
Although I only have 3 locations here, all GNOME Applications support this, and is up to third party developers to make use of it. By pressing the Gear Button we can add or remove locations.
This is really nice as we can set the Folders we want to search files from. By default GNOME will look in our Home and our special Folders, but we can also add system directories, our Cloud Files and whatever else. In my installation that didn’t worked very good, but GNOME is only approaching 3.7.3 release.
The results come in a List View now, and while it seems a waste of space, it keeps a clean order and Shell can show the full titles. When there is more that a certain number of results a symbol will be displayed, and we can make use of the typical <Show More>. The point is that the system should be smart enough to guess the results we are expecting to view and display them first, based in some simple algorithms like recent and favorites.
Special files like Contacts will open with their associated Application, (ie GNOME-Contacts), while in case of Files we can open directly the Nautilus either in the specific file location, or in Search Mode.
This is not ready yet, and I am missing some providers, but this is how about to work.
Shell Vs Unity Dash Search
Unity Dash has received a great amount of work, maybe more than Shell in the part of searching and displaying results, but I think Unity has failed by design with all these Lenses and Filters. None of my friends that use Ubuntu don’t actually use Unity Dash, and I am not trying to compare the two desktops, but I think that GNOME has made a more sophisticated approach there by following the single Search Input.
A strong weakness is that Shell won’t support -at least for now- special operators for searching (ie Videos: myvideo) as many people had asked, and it doesn’t also support regular expressions. However this “naked” environment leaves plenty of room for such smart mechanisms, that may come with extensions.
My Gigabyte got fire :/
I was 3 days without a PC, and here is the reason..
The -not so- funny thing is that I had bought that Motherboard (970A-D3) just 15 days ago, it burned my CPU and RAM, and Gigabyte doesn’t replaces such damages. Oh by the way, I bought this M/B to replace my other Gigabyte that also got broken. Thank you very much GIGABYTE :)