[feature request] ability to search for messages in a room

[brevilo]

Your use case

What would you like to do?

I would like to be able to search for messages in a room. Even better search for messages across joined rooms/spaces but let's start small and focus on relative priority, so search per room first.

Why would you like to do it?

Finding previous messages is often very important and can't be done right now (well, just manually)

How would you like to achieve it?

Like in element-web/desktop, which would also help improving UI consistency across platforms

Have you considered any alternatives?

Scrolling manually through the timeline to look for an old message is a huge PITA, for obvious reasons. I'm using threads as a workaround (poor-man's bookmark) for messages I already know I'll refer back to later. Obviously none of these can or should be an alternative to an actual message search.

Additional context

I couldn't find any related issue for ElementX (Android and iOS) but consider the lack of a message search to be a major one. Thus any solution found here should become part of the common/shared portion of ElementX, i.e. also become part of the iOS variant.

Are you willing to provide a PR?

No

[du82]

Signal has the ability to search thousands of encrypted messages in hundreds of chats, Element should too.

[opusforlife2]

This has been a major complaint of my contacts. I think I'd read somewhere that using the Rust SDK would allow this to be implemented easily? Is that true?

[kittykat]

Moving to element-meta as we need to implement this on both iOS and Android