Quote:
Originally Posted by MelBr
Calibre's search is not user friendly if you have to type in cryptic stuff like author:"=John Smith". And even then a hyphen or a comma or a semicolon or a period will trip you up so your point is quite pointless and doesn't solve the bigger issue.
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You do not HAVE to type it that way. You can simply type
John Smith and get the result. You also have an option to use column names, such as
author:"=John Smith". That is not all, however, because you can omit that equal sign so Calibre doesn't do a "full string match", so a much better way would be to search
authors:"John" and authors:"Smith". This search term would return books written by "John Smith", "Smith, John", "John T. Smith", or even "Johnathan Smither".
There are also Regular Expression support that makes the search extremely powerful.
You do not have to remember those authors:"=something" or title:"FooBar", there is nice icon to the left of the search bar where you can use "Advanced search" dialog panel to construct an advanced query without learning anything. When the query is ready, you can then refine it further by direct edit. If you like the query you can save it as a Saved search and tweak it a little bit when you do similar search next time. You can also build a Virtual Library, you can use left pane to select combination of authors, tags, formats, ratings, publishers,
saved searches, whatever and have query constructed automagically. Then you can edit the query, or save it, or ...
So, query system in Calibre is very powerful and advanced and offers many features that even some databases lack. You can still use it just by typing a simple string, so you do not have to be a database guru to use it 99% of time.
Now, please tell me what exactly is the search lacking? A built-in SQL query statements for JOIN?
Please Kovid, if you do read this discussion, *please*, do not dumb down the search just because some users can not be bothered to read documentation or use icon next to search bar ;-)