Official Quick Search Preview

Right, now that you mention it I see that the text is selected for a brief time window (one frame?), then is deselected, looks like it might be a bug. This also happens in 3.0.0-preview.18, just downloaded it to check.
Btw, with the text selected (assuming the bug is fixed), I won't have to hit backspace right? I can just start typing and the selected text will be replaced?

I don't technically need this, I just wanted a way to be able to open quick search and instantly start typing what I want to search for without having to clear the previous search. If quick search is supposed to start with the previous query selected (such that you can instantly begin typing, ideally without having to even hit backspace once, just replacing the previous query) then I'm satisfied.

 

It happens in a clean project as well for me. I'm on 2020.3.18f1, and it also happens on 2020.3.19f1.

 

Awesome

 

I'm getting tons of this error when I search using preview.19, Unity version 2020.3.18f1

 

Unfortunately no. Also, it has stopped reproducing (good for me ). It stopped after I "iterated" over all the results (using the arrow keys) in the problematic query. I tried deleting the index file, but it still doesn't show up. The only shot in the dark I might have is that we sometimes get the following warning on some of our shaders/materials, and those shaders/materials might have shown up in the problematic query. Don't know if it's related at all, just thought about it since it looked like the error was related to getting a preview of something.

 

This was not the case in 3.0.0-preview.17, which was what I had installed, but updating to preview.19 made it work like you're describing. So you probably fixes this recently!

 

Hi,

I am new to Quick Search and installed v3.0.0-preview.19 on Unity v2020.3.17f1.

Following along with the documentation when I type '?' in the search bar I expected to see a similar result of help options like are shown in the documentation. Instead I get what looks like a search result looking for instances of '?' with 20K entries.

Is something broken or is the documentation out of date? Should I not use any of the preview versions?

Thanks,
Shawn

 

When I completely remove the package and install v3.0.0-preview.18 this issue goes away. Once I update to v3.0.0-preview.19 the issue returns. If I downgrade to .18 from .19 without first removing the package the issue persists.

 

I want to customize QuickSearch like this:
- Search all game objects in the scene that have component Image and sprite is None (h: t:image -p(sprite):"")
- When selecting a search item in the search popup, it will assign a new sprite (load from the project) to that search item.
Please help me.

 

Using 2021.2.0f1 - It looks like Quick Search has now been integrated into the core editor instead of being a package (great!).

The old shortcut of Alt-' isn't mapped now but I do see Ctrl-K brings up Edit/Search All ... is 'Search All' a new name for Quick Search?

Assuming this is the rebranded Quick Search ... this version also seems to have the bug where previously entered text isn't selected on reopening the search.

 

Yeah, it's confusing that there's both a "search all" and a "quicksearch" entry in the shortcut manager, that seem to do the same. Some holdover, or?

 

Greate, can you help me with a custom script that assigns another sprite to the selected item in the search popup?

 

why is it indexing everytime i start unity ? When i start unity, i can't search anything for a while, that's really annoying ! (everyone knows unity crashes now and then, waiting for indexing is not an good option)

 

Scrolled through some of this thread to look for something else, and I just thought I'd let you know - we figure out the AssetDatabase/Resources thing. We were trying to look for assets too early (in InitializeOnLoad). When we do that, any assets that have been changed externally will not be available, and and AssetDatabase or Resources call trying to fetch them will return null. This is intended behaviour, as the old behaviour where you were able to fetch the assets was actually sometimes returning the old, cached version of the asset from the database.

@Unity_Javier was kind enough to write up a great explanation here.

Any assets that haven't been changed externally will be fetched correctly, so this bug is a bit hard to catch.

So if you're building your caches early enough, that might be why newly created scenes that I pull in from git doesn't show up in quick search for a while.

 

The reason why I was scrolling through this thread was because I'm pretty sure somebody from the QS team (maybe @jonathans42?) answered a question about QS continually warning about "A filter for "vertices" already exists. Please remove it first before adding a new one.". There was a fix for that in a specific commit, but the issue is still there in the latest available version of QS (Version 3.0.0-preview.22 - November 04, 2021)

Any timeline on when the fix will be pushed to a publicly available version?

 

2021.2.4. i guess the indexing strategy may not ideal for me,
i use two different PC to work on the same project (through git). i think it may be better to automatically indexing when starting unity rather that after open the search window.

 

Yup! This led me down a rabbit hole, and I remembered that the place I first saw that message pop up was with Search Extensions, and you already told me how to fix it.

Installing the latest version of com.unity.search.extensions did the trick, and that was what was sending the message all along. I did "Add package from git url" with the new path you pushed to the instructions on Github yesterday.

 

I know that it may not be that important when compared to your other work, but could you look at doing a UI pass on the search window for consistency? To be honest to me the window feels a bit jarring when I open it, it doesn't feel like it fits in with the aesthetic/styling of the rest of the editor. I can elaborate on specifics if you want, but I to just want to put it out there that this is something that is desired (by at least me).

Also, you goes are doing good work, and overall I do really like the search window and API.

 

Sure, I can do that! When I wrote this I was using the newest 2022.1 beta (downloaded today).

The colors for the alternating background in the results view is different than the colors of the alternating background of the UIToolkit ListView. And on hover it lightens the background, where the ListView darkens it. I also personally find the contrast to be too much, and feel it almost adds more noise than it helps with readability. The ListView's contrast is much more pleasant for me.

(Left side - Search Window, Right side - ListView example)

The footer uses a darker color rather than a lighter one like the Package Manager and Project Browser use. This also makes it look a bit tacky imo when next to one of them.

(Matching color on left, current color on right)


(Comparison currently next to project browser)

The big "Search Unity" text in the empty search field makes it feel like a bar title to me, both because it is center aligned and because it is the normal text color. Having text at the start where the actual text is would feel nicer imo and draw the eye to where it should be. It is also more inline with how most searchers in other software look.

(Top/back - current, bottom/front - suggestion)

The icons in the footer don't follow any 'toolbar' rules. The hover/selected background is only around the icon itself with no padding. This looks quite messy to me, and makes it obvious that the icon are odd numbers and not even (not complaining about them being odd, to be clear).
The hover/selected background should take up the full height of the footer and a set width, an example of this is in the Packages Manager.

In addition to that, I think it would look nicer with dividers/borders between them, this helps break them up a bit and also lets you group together the 3 style toggles.

(Top/front - current, Bottom/back - suggestion)

The "Searches" and "Inspector" panel toggles don't have anything to do with searching field itself, so I don't feel like they should be next to it. Along with that, their headers are inline with the "All, Project, Hierarchy, etc." toolbar, so to me it makes them feel more natural if they were there as well.
The only downside I see to this would be for the inspector, you would need to move the mouse when you toggle it on/off as the icon would move, but I also think there is some way UX design to solve that.

(Left/back - suggestion without searches panel, Right/front - suggestion with searches panel)

Also, random thing I noticed, the "Searches" panel header is one pixel shorter than the results area header.


The rounded corners of the "Tab to filter" dropdown doesn't go with other dropdowns in unity which are square. The text of the selected item is not white as you will see it is in basically every where in the editor when the background is the 'selected blue' color. Having it white also just helps it pop a bit.

(Current)


(Changed)
I also think that making it a lighter colors looks a bit nicer maybe. Idk if it fits the 'unity style' exactly but I think a drop-shadow also helps it look nicer and pop more too.

(Lighter background and slight drop-shadow)

The way the the item/results area is show when there is no search is something I am not a fan of and doesn't feel 'Unity' to me. This is mostly due to the darker area in the center. So what I would do is make the whole background the same color. In the mockup I made the background the same color as the results background (and project browser background) so that it should feel like a nice transition between the two. I think the layout and styling could be tweaked too to look nicer in this format, but I don't have any ideas off of the top of my head. I can mess around with it to see about getting something nicer if you want, it just takes time.

(Left/back - current, Right/front - suggestion)

Maybe in practice I would feel differently, but I kind of feel like the Query Builder toggle would be nicer inside of the search field as it directly alters how it functions (I don't have strong feelings about this, just an idea that I think would make it better, maybe)

(Toggle inside search bar with styling similar to the object field, but on the left side instead of the right)


(Toggle inside search bar with styling like a standalone icon button)


The header of the inspector feels 'thrown together', I think I feel this way about it because the layout of the buttons, there is a lot of empty space, and it doesn't have a 'header line' like the "searches" pane does. So I would just make them icons maybe? Its the best I got atm.


This is tiny one but imo makes a different, the search field uses the old field style where all borders are the same color, where the new field style has the top border darker.

(Old field style)

(New field style)

The grid icon selection and hover style is different than the Project Browser. I'm not saying I don't like it. I I like it better than the current project browser styling. I guess more so I want the project browser to update its styling. I just want them to have the same object grid styling really...

I think this is all I can see at the moment. I didn't realize I should use the images you provided until I was almost done, so... my bad. I hope this helps, I know a lot of it seems pedantic, but it makes a difference... at least to me.

Also, I noticed in the images that the All/Project/Hierarchy/etc. 'toolbar' doesn't have a bottom border. If that is coming in the future, you can add it to this list for me

 

That's great to hear! I will never complain about getting more APIs! Nice that you will be able to do so much!

 

I really appreciate that you are open/willing to make these changes! I'm glad that you like a lot of them! I look forward to future updates

Yeah a lot of them are really easy. You will most likely spend less time fixing the things then I spent writing that comment about them, hahaha.

 

Hey, so I just found out that the

name:

filter was removed, and I just released an asset that uses it. (My fault for not testing with the newest version and reading the changelog) So my question is, what would be the proper way now to search for an asset by its name?

 

I don't mind using regex, but for the life of my I can't figure out how to search only the file name. I looked several pages back but couldn't find the example you were talking about (there is like 15 pages...).

I don't know where to give feedback on this, but I find the new docs on the main site to be very hard to find the info I want. It feels like it is all scattered around, I also mis not having the 'cheat sheet' like the 3.0 docs have.
Also there is incorrect/misleading info in multiple places. For example, it says that

"t:texture"

will only search the name, which is correct, but only because there isn't a type with that name.

"texture"

will still search for type and name.

 

Another question, how do you 'ignore' spaces in a folder name. For example

p:assets/test folder/

to get all of the assets in the "Assets/Test Folder" doesn't work.

 

I found a bug where QS simply can't find some indexed items it seems. In the screenshot you can see that QS only shows a single asset, at the path "assets/other" when there are in fact 2 other assets at that path. They seem to be indexed with the proper path as shown in the index manager. I would report this bug officially, but I can't figure out how to reliably reproduce it, but thought I would mention it incase you know what might cause it.

This is on Unity 2020.312f1 and QS 3.0.0-preview.22.
(To be clear, I clicked the "Build" button, waited to finish indexing and then searched in QS "assets/other", in that order)

 

Right so it seems just my project is bugged, that was the first thing I had tried but it didn't work. Tried in a different project and it work, thanks.

This only will do a exact matches unfortunately. What I think I need for regex is to match the start of a file name in a path. This isn't really 'your job' to give me regex, so I will go see about learning it again, and come up with something that mimics the

name:

filter.

Yup, The Unity manual layout I found to be a bit confusing and messy.

Will do.