Support searching only using the first N symbols of copy to increase search performance

[750]

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Problem

So my workflow is like this:

• I copy a lot of text every day, and that sometimes includes many big jsons, like a 1MB one (or 20MB, that happens too).
• When I copy big jsons, I don't really need it to be searchable. To paste it with Maccy, I just select them with arrow keys or mouse
• At the same time I do need smaller copies to be searchable

That workflow isn't quite well supported in Maccy: big items make search much slower which is quite unpleasant when I just need to find a 10 digit ID I copied two hours ago of which I remember the first two symbols

Here is a test i performed:

• Clean maccy storage
• Copy 20 string of sizes between 5 symbols and and 5 million symbols (the total size is 55MB)

I then tried searching, it was is very slow. During search, Maccy becomes unresponsive (eventually it will finish the search in a few seconds, but still)

I understand that this is probably not the most popular scenario, but I use it very often as a daytime software developer for debugging purposes

And of course, thank you for your great free open source app, it's been a lifesaver

Solution

Maccy could support a configurable "only search in the first N symbols of item" setting, with N=0 as the default (unlimited). That should make the search function virtually instant for all cases, independent of what was copied in Maccy previously

[weisJ]

I think the more reasonable approach here is to simply make searching faster. For example by migrating it to operate on an in-memory SearchKit index https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreservices/search_kit

[p0deje]

Maccy already searches for the first 5000 characters, can you provide exact texts where the search is slow?