Suggestion: Boolean operators for searches

[Mister-Odd]

Nixos-search is a huge database and often the results can be overwhelmingly numerous.

Searching for rofi options (there are none) pulls up every option with rofi in the word, like profile.

Boolean operators are pretty standard database search tools to help filter results. Phrase searching with quotes for "rofi" would have filtered out the "profile" results. Another boolean operator, NOT would have worked too. (IE "rofi" NOT profile or "rofi" -profile).
MIT has a good overview

It would be nice to be able to use these options on nixos-search.org!

Thanks!

[raboof]

nixos-search is currently backed by an ElasticSearch database, it might indeed be nice to expose more of its query language.

It might also be nice to show results in a 'tree view' (with short subtrees automatically expanded) rather than a 'list view' - in your example, you could more easily ignore all of services.system76-scheduler, for example.

[Mister-Odd]

I was going to look at what it took to add "ElasticSearch Boolean Clauses" to the current Elm frontend starting at elastic.co/docs. Three pages in, my head split open and dribbled all over the floor. Such a sticky mess (at least the cats have food now)!

I asked Copilot what to do... It looks super easy. Not sure why it hasn't been done already. /s

Some Elasti-Hero or Elm-Wrangler Is going to be the only person able to handle this.