What exactly should the search in gnome-shell do?

[Colin Law]

On 1 May 2017 at 10:28, Petter Adsen <petter at nillabs.com> wrote:
> On 01/05/17 09:48, Colin Law wrote:
>> Is it possible that the files search from the system search only
>> searches particular folders?  I ask this as it seems that it finds
>> files in Documents but possibly not in other folders under my Home.
>>
>> I have checked in System Settings > Search and both Files and
>> Documents are enabled.
>
> I *think* this is indexed by the 'tracker' service, see the
> 'tracker-gui' package for a way to set preferences.
>
> (I don't use GNOME though, so this is just from vague memory.)

Many thanks Petter, it seems you are correct. Having analysed what was
going on I see the confusion that I had was caused by the fact that,
by default, folders including a .git folder were excluded from the
search. What the logic of that is I have no idea, but having removed
that it is working much better. I wonder if this is a mistake and .git
should have been in the folders to ignore, rather than ignoring
folders containing .git.

In addition some of the glob patterns to ignore seem (to me)
inappropriate but now that I can adjust them as necessary all is
sweetness and light :)

In fact this is now one area when Gnome is better (for me) than Unity
as the search is much quicker to come up than in Unity and is fully
configurable.

Cheers

Colin