Plasma 6 Suggestion: Indexed System Settings
Hello there,
I've been using Plasma for about 4 years now and I truly enjoy it. That's also why I have contributed back to Kate and KTextEditor.
That said, one problem I keep encountering is not finding specific settings easily enough through the search in kicker/krunner or in system settings. The underlying reason for this is that the search is only based on the keywords specified in the individual KCMs.
Thanks to @waqar Kate has gotten a search function for its settings that highlights individual items that match a search criterion and the implementation works by traversing the qt widget object tree.
The suggestion I would like to make here is to implement something conceptually similar for system settings, but do the implementation differently. As traversing the whole object tree of all KCMs every time a search is made sounds like a bad idea :)
Rough sketch:
- Every time a KCM is installed, index it
- Use everything for indexing that could be used to match a setting (e.g. tooltip, text, headings, etc)
- Use baloo for indexing
- Fallback to keywords-based matching if baloo is not installed or disabled
Maybe this could also be put in a framework, so other apps could also benefit from this.
Disclaimer: I am no C++ and Qt wizard, and I am not familiar with the repositories involved, so this might be difficult or even infeasible to implement with the current architecture of things.
I just wanted to leave this here in the hope that someone is interested enough in this idea to pick it up at some point of time.