Wildcards implementation counterintuitive

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Scoox
Posts: 33
Joined: Wed Aug 25, 2010 1:07 am

Wildcards implementation counterintuitive

Post by Scoox »

void wrote:When using wildcards the entire filename is matched.
Please make sure you use a * prefix and * suffix if you want to find a wildcard expression anywhere in the filename.
I wouldn't have guessed that in a million years. My intuition simply told me that hello*world would match hello world and helloworld and hello1234world without having to type leading and trailing asterisks. because Everything normally treats whitespace as a logical AND. This is the way the mayority of Everything users intuitively think.

Likewise, the ? wildcard only works if the users includes leading and trailing asterisks, which something I would had never guessed either:

gr?y should match both gray and grey, but it matches nothing unless you type *gr?y*

I can see how the current implementation might be useful in situations where you want the search string to match at the beginning or the end of the file path, but 99.9% of the time this is not the case, because we normally search a part of the file path, which means that typing the leading and trailing asterisks becomes an unreasonable requirement. For the rare cases where the search string must match at the beginning or the end of the file path, users may use RegEx's ^ and $. In other words, for the sake of ergonomics the task that's more likely to be done all the time should require the least amount of keystrokes and thinking.

I did a Google search for this "problem" and found quite a few users were also baffled by the way wildcards work in Everything, which probably means that this can be improved/simplified becasuse it doesn't work the way people expect it to.

By the way, thanks a million for all the recent bug fixes, Everything is working rather sweet! :D
void
Developer
Posts: 15218
Joined: Fri Oct 16, 2009 11:31 pm

Re: Wildcards implementation counterintuitive

Post by void »

I hope to add wildcard matching anywhere in the filename and support for the wholeword: and wholefilename: modifiers in a future release.

This will probably be the default once implemented.
To get the current behavior you would have to use wholefilename:hello*world

I had hoped to add this in the current beta, but its quite a bit of work...

I will consider adding an ini option to allow wildcards to match anywhere in the filename with no support for the wholeword: modifier.

Thanks for your suggestions.
nagan
Posts: 302
Joined: Thu Apr 18, 2013 11:44 am

Re: Wildcards implementation counterintuitive

Post by nagan »

To get the current behavior you would have to use wholefilename:hello*world
I renamed three gif files as HelloWorld , Hello World , Hello1234World. Using the wfn modifier as mentioned above does not show the results. But Hello*World* displays them as the trailing asterisk makes up for the gif extension.I think the OP too would have had an issue with files with extensions.
Perhaps you could give the wfn a little leverage to exclude the extension part.
void
Developer
Posts: 15218
Joined: Fri Oct 16, 2009 11:31 pm

Re: Wildcards implementation counterintuitive

Post by void »

To get the current behavior you would have to use wholefilename:hello*world
This is what I plan to add, its currently not implemented.
Scoox
Posts: 33
Joined: Wed Aug 25, 2010 1:07 am

Re: Wildcards implementation counterintuitive

Post by Scoox »

Glad it's in the pipeline, thanks :D
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