MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Quick way to reduce search scope e.g. to just author?

kiwidude · 11-02-2010, 06:44 AM

About 90% of the time I do a search in Calibre I am just after a search for the author and most of the rest of the time just for title. It is extremely rare that I want to search "everywhere in metadata" which seems to be the default and I can find no way to constrict this outside of finnicky regular expressions. For instance to find all authors starting with "Smith" I could type this:

author:"~^smith.*"

Powerful? Absolutely! User friendly? Ermmm, no, not compared to just quickly being able to type "smith"?

I would love a dropdown next to the existing search so you can choose a scope such as for "author", "title", "tags", "anywhere" etc. I looked at the "Advanced Search" dialog and even that doesn't have the ability to constrain to a column, not that I would want to have to use that every time anyways.

Once your library gets over a certain size there is just way too much "noise" that comes back for the default search scope of "anywhere", and as the results are not sorted by relevance (your current browse sort used instead) it can get a little frustrating sometimes?

Has this come up before? I did a search on the forums without seeing anything. I know you can browse the authors in the listview on the left but again after a certain size this becomes less practical.

Perhaps I am missing something really obvious here - wouldn't be the first time! Many thanks for your input!

11-02-2010, 06:44 AM	#1
kiwidude Calibre Plugins Developer Posts: 4,735 Karma: 2197770 Join Date: Oct 2010 Location: Australia Device: Kindle Oasis	Quick way to reduce search scope e.g. to just author? About 90% of the time I do a search in Calibre I am just after a search for the author and most of the rest of the time just for title. It is extremely rare that I want to search "everywhere in metadata" which seems to be the default and I can find no way to constrict this outside of finnicky regular expressions. For instance to find all authors starting with "Smith" I could type this: author:"~^smith.*" Powerful? Absolutely! User friendly? Ermmm, no, not compared to just quickly being able to type "smith"? I would love a dropdown next to the existing search so you can choose a scope such as for "author", "title", "tags", "anywhere" etc. I looked at the "Advanced Search" dialog and even that doesn't have the ability to constrain to a column, not that I would want to have to use that every time anyways. Once your library gets over a certain size there is just way too much "noise" that comes back for the default search scope of "anywhere", and as the results are not sorted by relevance (your current browse sort used instead) it can get a little frustrating sometimes? Has this come up before? I did a search on the forums without seeing anything. I know you can browse the authors in the listview on the left but again after a certain size this becomes less practical. Perhaps I am missing something really obvious here - wouldn't be the first time! Many thanks for your input!