Fuzzy search in command palette

[jamonholmgren]

Issue: command palette doesn't do basic text fuzzy searching

Hitting cmd+P and typing in "foc spl" should give me Focus Split options, but shows nothing.

I'm willing to submit a PR (well-crafted and tested) if it is desirable behavior.

Fuzzy Match	Exact Match

Preliminary research

Initial review shows that these functions seem to do the searching:

macOS:

ghostty/macos/Sources/Features/Command Palette/CommandPalette.swift

Lines 71 to 89 in d8b1b09

	var filteredOptions: [CommandOption] {
	if query.isEmpty {
	return options
	} else {
	// Filter by title/subtitle match OR color match
	let filtered = options.filter {
	$0.title.localizedCaseInsensitiveContains(query) ||
	($0.subtitle?.localizedCaseInsensitiveContains(query) ?? false) ||
	colorMatchScore(for: $0.leadingColor, query: query) > 0
	}
	// Sort by color match score (higher scores first), then maintain original order
	return filtered.sorted { a, b in
	let scoreA = colorMatchScore(for: a.leadingColor, query: query)
	let scoreB = colorMatchScore(for: b.leadingColor, query: query)
	return scoreA > scoreB
	}
	}
	}

Linux:

My current assumption is that I could change these functions to do a fuzzy ordered string match, and it would solve this problem. If this is desirable, I'll do a pass at implementation.

EDIT: Linux would need to be custom GTK filtering utilizing zf (per jcollie's answer below).

[rhodes-b]

The part you linked for linux has nothing to do with command palette at all that is the search overlay with ctrl+f

[jamonholmgren]

Oops, yes -- @jcollie pointed out we'd need to implement it in GTK using zf, so that's the route I would take. Updated.

[jcollie]

I think that having a fuzzy search in the command palette would be great. I attempted such a thing in the past for GTK but I had something wrong and got segfaults so I moved on to other things and abandoned it. Note that we already have a fuzzy search library (zf) dependency so you'd have to use that.

@rhodes-b is correct that you're looking at the wrong part of the source code, the filtering for the command palette is done elsewhere.

I'd also recommend not trying to do both platforms at once. Do one, get the PR accepted, and then do the other. Also, if you can't personally test your changes on a platform don't even try to vibe code your way through it.

[jamonholmgren]

don't even try to vibe code your way through it

Yes for sure, not going to vibe code anything here. Any PR submitted would be with a screenshot of it running on the applicable platforms.

This was more of a "would this be something people want" discussion; my bad on linking the wrong function for Linux.

[pluiedev]

Yeah this is something that's always been planned. My first iteration of the command palette actually had zf-based fuzzy search but it got cut to save time and energy for the reviewers. Now that the feature has matured a bit I think it's time to revisit that