Author Topic: FARR Plugin: TinyEV (Everything integration) - 0.9.5 - 12 June 2009 (updated) (Read 106743 times)

akx · « **on:** June 11, 2009, 11:05 AM »

Heya. I wrote a little (literally) FARR plugin for Voidtools' Everything content search engine, since the other one was somewhat sluggish and large. This one, on the other hand, seems to be quite snappy and small (less than 16 KiB! :D), hence the name.

However, it doesn't come with a built-in settings dialog (oh no!), so if you want to change the only currently available setting, the scoring mode, you'll have to hand-edit an .ini file. I'm sure you'll cope. :) Also, this does not require the es.exe shell; just a running Everything instance.

Any comments, bug reports and suggestions are welcome, however I may be off on vacation for a week or so.

Download here:
FARR_TinyEv-0.9.5.zip

OLD LINKS NO LONGER WORKING:
FARR_TinyEv-0.9.5.zip (18 283 bytes) SHA1: 95a9126765a18fd64a7a3325c2fe6eb4d60ded4a

FARR_TinyEv-0.9.4.zip (18 234 bytes) SHA1: 8e95113b32f008b53c9cffca9aa94f1694ed1f38

Changelog:
0.9.5: Added regexp support.

How to install:
Copy the folder enclosed in the ZIP file into your FARR Plugins directory, and instruct FARR to rescan plugins (Options -> Plugins and Updates -> Click To Examine And Configure Plugins -> Find and Reload All Plugins).
I recommend disabling the other Everything plugin in case you have it installed.

Tips and tricks:
Prefix your search with a dollar sign to use regular expression search.

nudone · « **Reply #1 on:** June 11, 2009, 11:48 AM »

i'm late to the party on this one. i didn't realise there was a FARR plugin for everything (fantastic idea, akx).

just wondering if i'm doing something wrong...

i use Everything under Vista with UAC turned on, which requires the run as a service trick to get Everything to load at startup.

here's a screengrab of what i mean:

as you can see, if i type "ev..." i don't actually get a list of results matching the search term. (there are several "new folders" on my drive.)

do i need to configure the plugin somehow.

anyone have an idea?

edit:
Everything is constantly running on my machine by the way, but it looks like the FARR plugin can't see it.

mouser · « **Reply #2 on:** June 11, 2009, 11:50 AM »

you need to make sure Everything is running.. if it is, then the problem may be that you are running it as a service. maybe tell akx where he can learn about this service trick.

nudone · « **Reply #3 on:** June 11, 2009, 11:51 AM »

right, must the service thing then.

i'll dig out the method it requires and post back.

akx · « **Reply #4 on:** June 11, 2009, 11:55 AM »

Oh dear. If Everything is running as a service, there might be an issue with the privilege and desktop separation in UAC, Vista and services.
I personally have Vista with UAC disabled, so I can't exactly help, other than making sure that the desktop the Everything service is running as is an interactive desktop.

However -- don't you like how TinyEv informs you that something's wrong?

That was mouser's idea, actually.

nudone · « **Reply #5 on:** June 11, 2009, 11:59 AM »

okay, here's the method to run any program that usually requires UAC activation at startup.

http://blogs.techrep...ow-on-windows/?p=616

to make Everything work with this method you also require the "-startup" switch in the path for Everything.

(does that make any kind of sense?)

heheh. it's nice that it does tell you that something is wrong.

looks like i'll just have to keep Everything and FARR separate. not a real problem i must say.

akx · « **Reply #6 on:** June 11, 2009, 12:06 PM »

Maybe this could help you with making Everything work with its usual startup procedure and still run privileged?

mouser · « **Reply #7 on:** June 11, 2009, 12:08 PM »

akx, as you can see from Nudone's status bar, it says the IPC service is not running.. do you think the problem is something as simple as TinyEv not knowing how to detect it in this case, or a bigger problem in that there is no way to communicate with it when launched in that way.

akx · « **Reply #8 on:** June 11, 2009, 12:12 PM »

Actually, that particular message only appears when TinyEv can't send the query message to the Everything IPC window. I'm not exactly sure why that would happen, though. I'll try and investigate...

nudone · « **Reply #9 on:** June 11, 2009, 12:25 PM »

thanks, i'll also try the Selectively disable UAC for your trusted Vista applications later. got to go out now.

Nod5 · « **Reply #10 on:** June 11, 2009, 01:04 PM »

great great great!

Is it possible to customize the alias? I'd like to use " searchphrase" instead of "ev searchphrase" because that's much faster to type.

edit: it would be cool to be able to combine these searches with the FARR "+sall" command to get more results. Or alterantively, a hotkey to switch from a FARR internal Everything search to opening the Everything window with the same search phrase. That would be like a quick "go to advanced search mode" hotkey.

akx · « **Reply #11 on:** June 11, 2009, 02:17 PM »

Is it possible to customize the alias? I'd like to use " searchphrase" instead of "ev searchphrase" because that's much faster to type.
-Nod5 (June 11, 2009, 01:04 PM)

You can do that in FARR's plugin configuration dialog. I successfully changed "ev" to "kittens", works just fine.

Also, nudone: It seems that in UAC-enabled OSes, ie. W7 and Vista, non-privileged programs can not send Windows messages to privileged programs. I'm not sure if you can, or if it's sane at all to set FARR to run privileged, but if you did that, it probably could communicate with Everything.

cranioscopical · « **Reply #12 on:** June 11, 2009, 02:29 PM »

I successfully changed "ev" to "kittens", works just fine.
-akx (June 11, 2009, 02:17 PM)

So, now we have to launch FARR with the paws key?

akx · « **Reply #13 on:** June 11, 2009, 03:07 PM »

I successfully changed "ev" to "kittens", works just fine.
-akx (June 11, 2009, 02:17 PM)
So, now we have to launch FARR with the paws key?
-cranioscopical (June 11, 2009, 02:29 PM)

Mewbe.

Nod5 · « **Reply #14 on:** June 11, 2009, 05:16 PM »

I get "kittens searchphrase" to work but not " searchphrase". Putting just " " in the override box is no go. I'm unsure what regex format I need for the plugin, apart from this start "^ ".

Also, the swedish characters "åäö" aren't displayed in the results correctly

lanux128 · « **Reply #15 on:** June 11, 2009, 08:43 PM »

cool plugin! works fine on both - WinXP & Win7.

akx · « **Reply #16 on:** June 11, 2009, 11:06 PM »

Also, the swedish characters "åäö" aren't displayed in the results correctly
-Nod5 (June 11, 2009, 05:16 PM)

I'll have to look into hacking some Unicode support into the plugin. Problem is that mouser said that FARR isn't Unicode aware, which complicates things...

nudone · « **Reply #17 on:** June 12, 2009, 04:19 AM »

Also, nudone: It seems that in UAC-enabled OSes, ie. W7 and Vista, non-privileged programs can not send Windows messages to privileged programs. I'm not sure if you can, or if it's sane at all to set FARR to run privileged, but if you did that, it probably could communicate with Everything.
-akx (June 11, 2009, 02:17 PM)

i can confirm that running FARR "as administrator" allows the Everything plugin to work correctly. So, i'll probably just use this method.

thanks.

Nod5 · « **Reply #18 on:** June 12, 2009, 11:17 AM »

akx, thanks let me know if I can help out in any way (about åäö)

re using space as alias for this plugin: I again fiddled with the regex override box but can't get it to work. For a regular alias "^ (.*)" would be fine (together with $$1 in the command).

mouser · « **Reply #19 on:** June 12, 2009, 11:57 AM »

it may be because farr is trimming the leading space.. let me see if i can fix that.

akx · « **Reply #20 on:** June 12, 2009, 12:04 PM »

Nope, mouser. It's on my side. Fixed in the upcoming 0.9.5

akx · « **Reply #21 on:** June 12, 2009, 12:36 PM »

Updated first post with link to 0.9.5.

(edit: Oops, sorry for the double post...)

skwire · « **Reply #22 on:** June 12, 2009, 01:42 PM »

Thanks for the plugin. Would you consider adding support for the +sall feature in FARR? Alternately, you could add support for the 'extended results' setting in FARR.

delwoode · « **Reply #23 on:** June 16, 2009, 01:34 PM »

I'm slightly confused AKx, (Its easy to get me confused). If I use your plugin with everything do I still use ev before the search term ?
Also what i find strange is that when everthing is running the memory usage of FARR goes down to less than 1mb and everything is using 8.7mb

Nod5 · « **Reply #24 on:** June 17, 2009, 01:48 PM »

Using space as alias works in 0.9.5. Yay!

(use "^ (.*)$" as reg ex override)

The plugin already has ini options to let FARR filter and score the results. Two other things would be extremely useful:

1. an ini option to let FARR's alias recognition override the results.
example: if the alias "xyz" exists and the user types "ev xyz" then the alias takes priority (just like in a regular FARR search).
2. a hotkey or alias to switch search folder filtering on/off (and some visual cue like a statusbar text)

If we had 1 & 2 then then next step would be to have the plugin handle all searches in FARR.

edit: if 1 is added then an advanced feature would be to make the plugin ignore its own alias when filtering for aliases. That way, regexp aliases that require the alias phrase to be first in the input box would still match.
example: an alias with "^tv (.*)$" that in regular FARR matches on "tv bbc" but not on "aaa tv aaa" would still match when a user enters "ev tv bbc".