Adding features to gnome-launch-box
So, inspired by Quicksilver, I am thinking of ways to expand the capabilities of gnome-launch-box.
The first step I would take is adding a "browse" capability. This would allow a user to look inside and item they had searched for. The most obvious case would be a directory in the filesystem.
I have been fooling around and I was able to create a handler for the right and left arrows and I created a GList to keep track of the entries in a browse history, ie: if you browsed to a folder, and then another folder inside that, we need to keep track.
The bit I am stuck on, in desiging, is looking "inside" an item.
It looks like Quicksilver implements a get children operation. I guess someting similar would work.
In the simplest case, for a directory, we can really query the files module again, with a different starting directory. I am not sure how to implement that. I suppose for abstraction, to allow looking "inside" other types of items besides directories, we need a new type of operation. Since we know which item we want to look at, it could be attached to the item, but it looks like right now all the dispatching code is tied to Modules. I am not sure if there is a clear way to design this on top of the existing code.
Anyway that was a few questions, not too many answers. In anyone else interested in this type of thing?
I totally reimplemented this
I totally reimplemented this by defining a new interface "get_children" which a module can implement.
I added a behavior attached to the right and left arrow keys to populate a list, so you can descend into any level of folders, and back out. When you press the right arrow it calls get children with the first element of the list.
I also added the ability to search within a folder. If there are elements in the list, I know we are looking inside an item, and I call perform children search instead of perform search. This works, but I have a bunch of duplicated code that I need to figure out how to structure.
Is anyone interested? There's a few bugs and I need to add a way to tell you are in browse mode instead of regular search mode.
Another idea is to create a "catalog" like quicksilver has of things to search. It would also be fun to implement google search and like someone else suggested, allow using the searches from the deskbar.
I imagine this like a really smart command line. It would be neat to feed the results of a search to a command, or build up a list of selected items, and then perform an action on multiple items.
Dave Bauer
http://thedesignexperience.org/
Hi, Personally I'm only
Hi,
Personally I'm only using launchbox to start applications, but I'm sure others are interested in making it more featureful. We should definitely look into is to making the modules "real" loadable modules and add a UI to configure which ones are enabled.
Feel free to create bugs in the bug tracker and attach any patches there (http://developer.imendio.com/issues/browse/GLB).
/Richard
Ok so today I poked around
Ok so today I poked around deskbar-applet. Its all python and the module loader and modules are in python. I am totally lost figuring out if it would be possible at all to use the same type of modules to find results.
My best guess is either 1) implement GLB in python or 2) embed a python interpreter in GLB to load the ptyhon stuff.
Am I even close or totally out of my mind?
Dave Bauer
http://thedesignexperience.org/