Focus search bar in open file dialog

[martixy]

I'd like to put in a small feature request:

Give us some way to focus the search bar in the open file dialog.

Currently there is literally no way to focus it using the keyboard.

Ways to do it:
1. Automatically.
2. A setting to focus it automatically.
3. First tab press after opening dialog focuses it.
4. Possibly a command to do it (so it can be key-bound).

None of these are exclusive. In fact getting all of them would be ideal.

If I were to design this, I'd
1. Have a setting to auto-focus search box.
2. If enabled, first tab switches from search to the history list.
3. If disabled first tab switches from the history list to the search.

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

Hi, martixy

Thank you for the excellent feature request, I have forwarded this to our Dev team and they asked me to create the following ticket for you. While you cannot look this up directly yourself, you can ask any member of our support team here for an update.
RT#5117: FR: Auto-Focus "search" bar in File > open > recents list

I cannot provide a timeline on this, but it should certainly be possible.

Kind regards,

[martixy]

Oh, uh, one more thing, I just realized:
Currently, when you do make a search, pressing tab highlights the first found result, allowing you to open it, but it is impossible to navigate the list if there is more than one result - the up/down arrow keys do not work. (doesn't hurt to be thorough, good UX is tricky to design)

And lastly - this would be nice to have, but isn't a dealbreaker - improve the string matching algorithm.
More specifically make it work like it does in Sublime Text's or VSCode's "Goto ..." commands.
Essentially, don't match the exact search string, just the characters, in the order they appear. I'm not sure how good this description is, but I am certain at least someone on the dev team has used sublime or vscode, and they will know what I'm talking about.

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

Hi, martixy

For the first half, Its already covered in the ticket, I made sure to specify "a mouseless way to search and continue navigating through the History and recents lists"

As for search, I will forward the request to the Dev team for consideration, but cannot provide any guarantees of implementation at this time.

Kind regards,

[martixy]

Here we are, 3 years later and I'd still like to see this. It should be simple to implement, at least partially.

sigh

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

Hello, martixy

I am sorry you have been waiting so long. We have millions of clients and thousands of requests ongoing, Our Dev team however is very small and needs to prioritize requests which see a large volume of demand. So far I am afraid that this one has seen very little support, and as such is unfortunately a low priority. I have just put in a request to increase its priority as much as we can, but I cannot promise anything will be coming too soon unless this sees much more support from other users.

Kind regards,