Add Context To Search Results

[amartin3225]

Currently when reviewing search results, it is not always clear which result is the one you want because there is no context surrounding the matched message. It would be useful if search results would show several lines before and after each match (e.g. similar to grep -C 10 <search-string>)

[timabbott]

I think this would be a good feature in line with our vision.

This would be somewhat complicated to implement; it'll require at least:

• Backend work to fetch the relevant nearby messages. It may be nearly impossible to efficiently fetch the data desired for this as a single bulk query, so we'd likely end up needing to write a loop to fetch adjacent messages (making it slower than other, but potentially still usable).
• Frontend work to make the UI able to display these results in a sensible way.

I don't think this is ready for a contributor to work on; the backend design in particular needs to be done by a core team member before one will be able to make effective progress on this.

[zulipbot]

Hello @zulip/server-search members, this issue was labeled with the "area: search" label, so you may want to check it out!