A request & idea to actually improve "the search" of gnome

Hi,

I recently notice there are a lot of people discussing or mention possible improvement of “the search” interface over social media. Such as, implementing web search, dictionaries, calculator, Wikipedia search.

A lot of other developers/users would usually attach this link as a guide:

https://developer.gnome.org/SearchProvider/

However, a big problem is that the guide to implement a search provider is hard to read, full of gaps.

e.g. in the “basic” section it says:

For an application to become a search provider, it should implement the following D-Bus interface.

It is kind of not “basic” since a normal C/JavaScript programmer maybe don’t know how to implement d-bus interface, and they have nothing to do with this “basic”.

The C example of the implementation section is just jump into the codes brutally. It is hard to get a glue on how to combine them.

I think this is the biggest reason why developers would rather not to implementing search providers (and possible reason why a lot of them post the link to someone else :slight_smile: ).

I kindly ask/suggest improving this guide and examples.

Thanks.

Hello
I agree with you, I think some better examples here would be helpful.

When I was curious how the Shell search worked, I implemented a basic commandline version in Python: https://gitlab.gnome.org/sthursfield/desktop-search/-/blob/master/gnome-search-cli.py

I think a repo with that, and an example search provider in one or more languages, would be useful for app developers.

As for the docs – does anyone know what GitLab project holds the source for https://developer.gnome.org/SearchProvider/ ?

Looks like this wiki page: https://wiki.gnome.org/HowDoI/SearchProvider

Does the developer site synchronize with the wiki?

Parts of it are generated from packages’ API references, part is
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-devel-docs/ but I have no idea
about this particular page. It looks same enough. Try improving the
wiki page to see :wink:

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