playMaker

Author Topic: Force action search, to filter unwanted actions  (Read 1026 times)

Broken Stylus

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Force action search, to filter unwanted actions
« on: July 07, 2023, 06:14:37 AM »
After a while, some specific actions such as "send event" are lost in a sea of other actions that also have these two words in their name, so much that the required action is found at the bottom of the pile, and it can be a big stack.

So a user has to tap down with the down key or grab the mouse and scroll down the list to the necessary action. Worst of all, since it's impossible to loop back through the list, as you cannot go from the first to the last result, if you're going too fast, you're just returning to the top of the action list and that's just so annoying.

I remember asking for a similar feature a while back, where the first result is what one is exactly looking for, and then the rest of the results would be the similar results.

In the case of "send event", it is this action that would be exactly be found at the top of the results, and then, underneath, would be displayed the other actions that use these two words but with varying combinations with other words or with plural variations.

Failing this, then maybe consider adding the following function. I think there could be a quick way to force a specific search, as one does when using an internet search engine by using quotation marks around the specific words or sentences one is looking for.

Obviously having to use quotation marks would be cumbersome here but I noticed that the space bar is not used in PM. More precisely, typing the name of an action and adding blanks between words or after the last one changes nothing to the results. In fact, if i just type "sendevent" without blanks, the results will be the same as with "send event".

Which means the blank could be used to filter between 'normal' and 'forced' search. Say, adding one or more blanks at the end of a query would have the list filtered to displaying the closest matching result and nothing else. In the case of "send event", only this action would show up. If you try it and try to project for a moment what it would feel like, you see that typing an action's name and then just pressing space once more before pressing enter is very intuitive and quick.