Ulauncher: Make file browser more intuitive

[gornostal]

It's not obvious that user has to:

• start query with ~ or / to see the file browser
• press Alt+Enter to open an alt menu of a file/folder

[geckolinux]

I think that files and folders mixed in with application results is the best option, especially when combined with good adaptive intelligence based on frequency of use. For example, in my case, I would expect cl to bring up in this order:

1. ~/Documents/clients.odt
2. Clementine music player
3. Thunderbird mail client

[gornostal]

That would be an ideal solution.
Not so easy to implement however.

I'll take this suggestion into account when will be creating plugin for searching files.
In this ticket I only wanted to make file browsing more intuitive.

[geckolinux]

Maybe you could borrow some ideas from Albert, which does this quite well in my opinion. (It's method of updating the index isn't ideal, however.)

[orschiro]

@geckolinux maybe Albert and uLauncher — both are fantastic launchers — should just merge into one even greater project. :-)

[ibrokemypie]

In my opinion, the most useful would be to mix application and file searches, but allowing users to rank which search engine is most important, so if they search for something, application results show up on top with file results below them for example.

[simonwiles]

...and if extensions could add their results in with applications and file searches, that would be really great :)

[grahamjpark]

On a somewhat related note, I think having "Open Folder" and "Copy Path to Folder" being the top two options while typing would help a lot. Took me a long time to figure out how to open up a folder from the file search.

[amontalenti]

Agree with this. I also don't really understand why pressing ~ auto-populates as ~/, or why simply typing ~/some_folder <ENTER> (e.g. ~/Documents <Enter>) doesn't just open that directory in your file manager.