C3 event search needs improvement

Edit: I wrote a dedicated suggestion for it, vote here :

C3 Events Search improvements construct3-21h2.ideas.aha.io/ideas/C321H2-I-425

- the filter algorithm would allow us to type half words in any order and still find the matching events. (kinda like some Fuzzy Search algorithm)

- the results autoupdates as soon as the string changes

- both the Find field and the results pop-ups merge in a single window

I think it would avoid me to waste at least 45 minutes per day of Construct use and probably around 2h per days if you include the side-effects of those permanent flow-breakers.

+1 To be honest this must be the most annoying thing in my daily use of Construct for many years,

Because of the current limitation (it looks for event matching the exact requested string in the right order), you can only write 1 word at a time to find the event you're looking for, otherwise most of the time you end up with 0 results.

So if i need to find an event related to my Player's Angle, i either need to type "Player" (and i get hundreds of results as Player is used in a huge amount of actions and conditions) or "angle" (and i also get hundreds of results related to all kind of Object Types in my project) => Because of this, it returns thousands of results or irrelevant things each time

The expected result would be that i find all events related to Player's angle (or even related to instance variables names of Player that includes "angle" in their name) if I type either "Player angle" or "angle player".

Both should work and show me results such as :

- "Player:Set Angle_Aim to 90".

Right now if I type "Player Angle" it doesn't work

This enhancement would also be useful for all the other "find" fields in construct as it's the expected behavior in all cases we need to find stuff.

Also nowadays most software have even better find algorithm such as fuzzy search, so maybe an even better algorithm could be implemented.

In fact among the whole list of QOL stuff I wish Construct Team would add to the engine, I think this is the top priority right now.

Other possible enhancements :

Also the results of the "Find Results" pop-up should autoupdate when the user change the field "Find" in the "Find" pop-up. Right now we need to press the Find Button each time

Also, I wonder if it wouldn't be better if those "Find" and "Find Results" pop-ups would be merged into a single one.

Agree, the search function is horrendously useless sometimes.. I might have 1000 matches for "Player" in my events, and 1000 matches for "Set position". But it's not possible to find "Player Set position".

A small tip that I discovered: If you use the find window as a popup window, then you can click into the address bar of the find window, press ctrl+f, then you can use the browsers find feature to search through your find results.

Wow, thank you, it's a clever workaround! Maybe Scirra should add "search in search results" feature.

I also want to be able to filter or sort the search results by type - condition or action.

No probs, glad it was useful! I use C3 with 2 monitors, so I always have "find" and "find all references" popup windows on a 2nd monitor.

3 other small tips to help with big projects:

I often want to find when an object was created. If you search "create object sprite" or even just "object sprite" or "ct sprite", you'll often get the correct result fast.

You can leave comments with "tags" within. Say you have a complex HUD feature that links to many different events and event sheets, I'd write comments such as "TagForSearch: HUD System" near each event. You can then do a search for "tagforsearch: HUD system" to find all related events of a system you created. You can also do a search for "tagforsearch" to list all of your "tags", which can be useful. Bonus points if you use autohotkey to map a key to auto-type "tagforsearch" so it saves time typing this when doing a search.

Finally, emojis! Sometimes you might be working with, say, 3 different arrays, or multiple families. You can't change the icon of these types of objects, but it is very useful to have a visual indicator to what object is what, rather than having to read their name each time. Simply rename the array or whatever object to have an emoji such as a 🔴 or 🔵 or something distinctive, and you'll always instantly know what array you are looking at. You will even see the emoji within expressions as you scroll through your event sheets. Don't put the emoji at the start of the object name, or else you cannot quickly type its name when adding events, actions, or expressions. To be honest, I use this tip less, but I once had to do a massive change in my huge project to replace a spritefont object with a sprite object - by using "find all references" and giving the old spritefont a red 🔴 in its name and the new sprite is given a 🟢 in its name, it reminds me that "red is bad, this needs to be updated", and "green is good, this is correct". Sure I could have just kept using find all references, but seeing the little red dot amongst expressions helped me quickly edit my events to get the job done faster. Also just in case you didn't know, you can quickly get an emoji window to appear in Windows 10 by pressing "WINKEY + ." (Windows key and the period key).

EDIT: I made a suggestion a year ago, for enhancing the bookmark bar. Looking at this again, perhaps "colourful bookmarks" isn't user-friendly to those with colour-blindness, but perhaps bookmarks could have unique icons or tags against them instead. Either way, consider voting if you are a C3 user that has a huge project to navigate! construct3-21h2.ideas.aha.io/ideas/C321H2-I-4

Nice tricks, I already use some of them but it's not ideal for different reasons.

I think an effective Event Search would lessen the need of better Bookmarks as it would allow us to jump from any part of our project to any other part of our project very quickly and easily, without any manual setup to do.

I added a 3rd part to my suggestion on the platform to also solve all issues related to Project View Search on top of the issues related to Event Search.

construct3-21h2.ideas.aha.io/ideas/C321H2-I-425

It might look complicated at first because it describes both technical implementation and expected behavior explicitely, but in fact what i does is pretty simple and it's really user friendly :

- it would allow us to unfold Folders and Families that we search thanks to the Project View Search Field (which doesn't work right now)

- it would implement the same "Fuzzy Search-like" algorithm as I described above

- it would allow us to use Default Folders ("Layouts"/"Event Sheets"/"Families" etc..) and Custom Folders as effective filters for Project View search