File Search UI / UX overhaul

[BennoCrafter]

Discuss a possible UI change of the file search view

[BennoCrafter]

Hi!

I've been working on an overhaul of the File Search view in #875, which was closed, so I wanted to share some thoughts on why I did it initially. There were a few things I felt could be improved:

• Recent files: When you open the view, it starts out empty. Showing recently opened files would make it useful right away.
• File paths: Right now the full absolute path is shown, which makes it hard to see the file name. Showing just the file name would make searching a lot easier.
• Metadata: I think we could show a bit more useful metadata and present it in a cleaner way. (--> raycast)

I'd love to hear what you think :)

[BennoCrafter]

I traced back what raycast does for recent files. This is for macOS, but I think its easy to re-create it for windows and linux

mdfind -0 -onlyin ~ 'kMDItemFSContentChangeDate >= $time.now(-86400) && kMDItemContentType != "public.folder"' \
  | xargs -0 stat -f '%Sm  %N' -t '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S' \
  | grep -vE '/Library/|/\.|/(node_modules|vendor|Pods|venv|env|__pycache__|target|build|dist|out|coverage|DerivedData|tmp|temp|cache|Caches|logs?)/' \
  | grep -vE '\.(app|photoslibrary|musiclibrary|tvlibrary|bundle|framework)/' \
  | grep -vE '\.(log|tmp|temp|swp|swo|bak|cache|lock|pid|pyc|o|d|class|db-wal|db-shm|sqlite-wal|sqlite-shm|crdownload|part|download)$|~$|(package-lock\.json|yarn\.lock|pnpm-lock\.yaml|Cargo\.lock|Gemfile\.lock|poetry\.lock|\.DS_Store)$' \
  | sort -r

The command generates many noise files, so filtering them is needed. This works like intented and outputs for me the same recent files like raycast in "Search files" command

[BennoCrafter]

This will be real slow. Took me about 3.6 seconds for a run. Using fd takes half a second.

[BennoCrafter]

@Xoshbin

[Xoshbin]

Hi @BennoCrafter

Sorry for the delay again.

• Recent files: I think that would be a good additon, I like it.
• File paths: I agree on this one too.
• Metadata: I prefer the current way, where Asyar uses the entire right side to preview the files, while Raycast uses only a portion of the view because of the metadata. It would be best to see a demo so we can discuss it first please.

[BennoCrafter]

As I said: Recent files is kinda hard and Im not sure which approach we should take.
For a faster approach you would need extra requirements

[Xoshbin]

Please open an issue for this. When I have time, I will investigate it.

[BennoCrafter]

@Xoshbin I've created a draft PR for it. From there we can continue UI changes?