[PD] search plugin revision

Jonathan Wilkes jancsika at yahoo.com
Wed Mar 21 23:11:31 CET 2012


----- Original Message -----

> From: Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at at.or.at>
> To: Jonathan Wilkes <jancsika at yahoo.com>
> Cc: "pd-list at iem.at" <pd-list at iem.at>
> Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2012 5:47 PM
> Subject: Re: [PD] search plugin revision
> 
> 
> Very nice, a big improvement.  Its really looking quite complete.  Its getting 
> so good that I finally missed that it doesn't have a back button like lots 
> of browserly things these days.

There's probably a way to do that if someone wants to investigate.  There's a 
"dump" subcommand for the text widget, but you'd probably want to cache it 
on disk since results can be pretty big for, say, a search for "float".

Other issues:
* long searches on OSX.  I'm just doing a regex on every file as one big 
string (which is faster than foreaching each line).  Could be faster with an 
index but then not even half of all docs have keywords or metadata.
* users can easily trigger tk error messages because I'm using their input 
as the regex pattern.  Plus, I'm blithely treating the input as if it were a well 
formed list, and thus I've entered tcl "quoting hell".  The benefit is that I get 
string quoting for free, and I'm quite fine with that vs. the cost of an error 
with a complex regex pattern.
* external libraries that don't have a *-meta.pd patch won't get listed in the 
external libraries list.  (Simple fix, though.)
* Pd's chronic lack of user-friendly documentation is even more obvious.  
One external library's description is something like "my bag of tricks"!
Of course many of the libs are just directories for a particular developer's 
experimentation, but if you see a description that can be improved let 
me know and I'll fix it.

-Jonathan

> 
> Its definitely ready to be on the puredata.info/downloads page, at the very 
> least.
> 
> One minor thing, it seems that the widget frames and the background are slightly 
> different shades of grey (see attachment):
> 
> 
> 
> 
> .hc
> 
> On Mar 21, 2012, at 5:14 PM, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
> 
>>  Search plugin revision:
>>  1) links to tutorials, manual, and other stuff to guide beginners on the 
> front page
>>  2) tutorial and libdir filebrowser obsoletes the <ctrl-B> HelpBrowser
>>  3) folder icon allows to open any directory (or libdir) in external file 
> browser
>>  4) Found an object in the search results you've never seen before? 
> Click the 
>> 
>>  info icon to automatically open the readme file from the libdir author!
>>  5) search results in alphabetical order, with internal objects listed first
>>  6) see a hint in the statusbar for all links
>>  7) description/author/license/version automatically listed for every libdir 
> in the libdir format
>> 
>>  -Jonathan
>>  <search-plugin.tcl>_______________________________________________
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> 
> 
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