GNOME 3.36: Improve Files Tags Filtering (UX - Feature Request)

One of the best things in Files app is the Tag Filtering capability. But it is also one of the worst features because it is so annoying to bring it on play. Here’s what I mean. Assume we’re looking for a video that talks about gestures. What we need to do, is to open Files. Go to search. Open the drop down. Select “video” tag, and then actually search for gestures. So, we planted the seed and the flower didn’t grow.

00:44 - Meaning this is so extremely slow, that we won’t even bother. A better way would be if we could directly type “video and gestures” on search, and with some better indexing and some deep learning, Files should understand that the user probably is looking for a video, perhaps with some “gestures” metadata. But because GNOME won’t get any Anime Intelligence Assistance any time soon, at least they could improve the tags UX, and I’ll show you a very simple way how to succeed that. oh, and meanwhile? It would be a good idea to merge the regular expressions matching on search bar. Okay, Windows 10, and there is this search utility called Blast that launches with Super+Y What we can do here, is to type “video” on search, then we can press Tab key, and it will make “video” a tag, so next we can perform the actual search term.

01:34 - Blast doesn’t work exactly like that, but I guess you got the point and how we can make filter tags in Nautilus so much faster! And so, it is your duty to go on Files Gitlab, open an issue and discuss with maintainers how you can improve filtering, and next open a Merge Request! I provide the motivation, you provide the code! Since I booted on Windows 10 before, here’s a quick demo with the Linux subsystem support on Files. But if you don’t use Windows, don’t believe anything you read. The WSL is far far from convenient to make some serious work! .