As I already mentioned in some other thread I am a strong supporter of this feature (though I don't fully understand s.newaves proposal how /HISTORY-Keyword should work). The key to me seems a larger and separate history file that can optionally be included in search. That would be easy to implement, easy to turn off and very effective.
basically in the alias results section of your alias you would have the
option of adding the key /HISTORY=<search group> at the end of the search string:
IMDB - $$1 |
http://www.imdb.com/find?q=$$1 /ICON=icons\imdb.ico
/HISTORY=moviesFandango - $$1 |
http://www.fandango....+People+Video&q=$$1&repos=Movies /ICON=icons\fd.ico
/HISTORY=moviesGoogle - $$1 |
http://www.google.com/search?q=$$1 /ICON=icons\google.ico
/HISTORY=searchYahoo - $$1 |
http://search.yahoo....&ei=UTF-8&p=$$1 /ICON=icons\yahoo.ico
/HISTORY=searchAmazon.com - $$1 |
http://www.amazon.co...&field-keywords=$$1 /ICON=icons\amazon
/HISTORY=hardwareNewegg.com - $$1 |
http://www.newegg.co...A=0&Description=$$1 /ICON=icons\newegg.ico
/HISTORY=hardwareand farr would maintain a history.ini file that looked something like:
[movies]
0=4>imdb>dark knight
1=1>fandango>pineapple
[search]
0=2>google>farr launcher
1=5>yahoo>donation coder
[hardware]
0=1>newegg>raptor hdd
1=2>amazon>geforce 512mb
The nice thing about this is that you could add as many or as little search groups as you wanted and you could share search groups among aliases. Then in the future when you used your fandango alias to find showtimes and started typing dar, "dark knight" would show up in the results list along with any other relevant past searches you made for the "movies" search group.
then i think the best way to show the history file entries (when using that alias) is to have a drop-down list next to the cursor or above the FARR windows (that would be even better IMO)
-nitrix-ud
Knew that was coming based on our previous discussions
. I really think is the wrong way to go for this though. from a ui standpoint you would be adding an additional dropdown/up box. i think this would add another layer of complexity and it just doesn't seem that intuitive. Not sure how this would work for mutliple result aliases unless you only had one type of search group. It seems like extra steps for me and not as flexible.
which makes me wonder, how would you do for multiple result aliases ?
-nitrix-ud
To get the system i proposed to work with aliases that have multiple results would require a little tweaking, which is why i suggested making the "Include history entries in search results" an option. The 2 ways of handling multiple result aliases that i can see are:
-the first option is if the history recording added the ability to filter out the alias as suggested above so you would be able to search the history more effectively but you would not have history results as you search.
-the second option involves a little tweaking of how these aliases work. Imo the value of these types of aliases comes from the idea of grouping common searches and only having to remember one alias (i.e. torrent) and then being presented with multiple torrent related searches. However i think ultimately the majority of these searches end up using only one specific search. A typical workflow might be:
torrent<enter>
torrent "linux" - and then based on which search engine you wanted to use you would either arrow down to the desired search and hit enter (i.e. mininova - linux) or hit the Ctrl-# shortcut.
Most times you end up using a single search at the end anyway which is why all my searches are single result aliases. I find it easier to simply have an alias for each search i want such as mininova or the pirate bay etc.. However i definitely see the benefit of having these type of aliases and would suggest something like the following.
Make each result in a multiple result a nested alias. Then you would first type and enter into the alias, select the search engine you want, hit enter, followed by the search term. Using the example above you would do something like:
torrent<enter> : enter into alias
torrent "mininova"<enter> : enter into mininova search
mininova "linux" - enter linux search term
at this point you would be in a single search stage where you could display the relevant search history results for whatever search group you specified as
history results in the results list.
As far as how to implement this, one idea might be to add the ability to enter aliases in the results of an alias, maybe with a special character like "!". O you could just use restartsearch <alias>. One advantage of this is that by default farr would come with common groupings of aliases like it does now for search, music, etc.. but users would also be able to access the nested alias directly (i.e mininova, ebay) if they wanted.
This probably wouldnt work for everyone but i think it is the most intuitive and flexible way of doing it.
