[MonoDevelop] Lucene-based full-text search

[Michael Hutchinson]

Hi Sergey,

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 5:34 PM, Sergey Lobko-Lobanovsky
<sergey at bitfold.net> wrote:
>> I can't think of anything offhand, it was just an idea that had been
>> thrown around ("wouldn't it be awesome if searches were instant?").
>> Other ideas in the same area would be
>> * indexing all references to make "find references" instant - though
>> maybe thsi could be done in pidb files rather than lucene
>
> Been thinking of that, too. Great minds think alike, lol
> In my previous experience I had been a total VS.NET fan, until recently when
> I picked up ActionScript, Java/Scala and the IntelliJ IDEA IDE.
> IDEA rocks, enough said :) So I am going to use it as the source of ideas.
>  And it totally looks like the fulltext index + probably some AST parsing
> are the cornerstone for most productivity tools. That's why I decided to
> start with the Lucene integration task.

That makes sense. I'm sure Mike Krueger could give some input on that
area. We do a get a lot of people asking for Resharper (also made by
JetBrains) features for MD.

>> * some kind of global search (project, files, panels, docs, commands)
>> like QT Creator and VS Productivity Tools
>>
>> (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2010/08/03/quick-access-extension.aspx)
>
> Will need to take a look.

VS productivity tools and power tools addin have a bunch of neat
ideas. I particularly like the Solution Navigator pad.

>> - lucene would totally make sense for this, especially as MonoDoc docs
>> already have NLucene indexes
>>
>> I'd love to hear any more ideas you have for improving usability and
>> productivity!
>
> The very basic ideas I have found very useful are:
> 1) Quick open (Ctrl-Shift-N in IDEA), where you start typing either the
> capital letters or the full name of the file you wanna find, and it gives
> you a live list of files to jump to.

We've had this for ages - "Go to File" (Alt-Shift-O) and "Go to Type"
(Control-Shift-T) - and in MD 2.4 we added "Navigate To..."
(control-,) which behaves like VS2010, i.e. essentially go to any
file/type/member :)

> 2) IDEA-style of the Find all references feature - as opposed to a flat list
> similar to VS.NET/MD, it gives you a hierarchical list grouped by usage type
> and source file

That would be nice.

> 3) Then I'd love to introduce the smart tags feature - MD lacks it and it's
> a pain to manually include all the namespaces you need :), but that's a
> longer term shot.

Yup, definitely. The hard problem's not the UI though so much as the
background analysis and suggestions engine. I started on some
background analysis stuff a few months ago -
http://twitter.com/mjhutchinson/status/19875030462 - but I never got
around to integrating MD's type resolver and implementing more complex
analyses. Another related idea could be to attach quick fixes to
compiler errors.

> In case you need some testing from me, my setup is:
> Ubuntu 10.04 on a 4GB 2-core HP ProBook 4710s
> MonoDevelop from the trunk (not sure how this is called in the Git terms, I
> don't have previous Git experience so learning something new here as well :)

The main git branch is called "master".

-- 
Michael Hutchinson
http://mjhutchinson.com