In the plugin browser there are already a lot of buttons for filtering plugins (which is fine, but it takes a bit of effort to think of the categories you need to click), but I think we also need something more straight-forward. 99% of the time, I know exactly which plugin I need. An ability to just type in a little search bar that simply filters all of the plugins by their titles, would be more than enough for me. Type "Vit" and boom, Vital/Vitalium appears.
It would be good to have the same exact function for the file browser. Most of the time I know I'm in the right folder, but the folder contains hundreds of files. A quick filter-style search would allow me to instantly find what I want.
this is already implemented for the plugin browser - just start typing
it's a little hacky though and you need to press Esc to cancel the filter
Oh I didn't even know that. I think it would be better to have a search bar, though. Otherwise I wouldn't have noticed. Also it seems to need more work, it looks like it's trying to filter both categories and individual plugins. And sometimes it doesn't seem to filter anything.
I would suggest working on this because anything that can speed people's process is a big plus for a DAW.
I will look into that after upgrading to gtk4 in v2. the current implementation is a hack. you can use favorites to speed up plugin filtering in addition to type-to-search
I agree having an explicit search bar would help a lot for discovering that feature.
Also, having a globally bound shortcut like Ctrl+F that focuses and puts the keyboard input into that search field would speed up that workflow even more, that way inserting a plugin gan be done with a natural keyboard-only workflow:
Ctrl+F > type "Vit" for eg. Vital > hit enter > done
Added in plugin browser