Dolphin's Search does not respect wildcards. For example, if I want to search all files with the extension name .tar: If I searched for "*.tar" It returns nothing. If I searched for ".tar" It ignores the period and lists everything that has "tar" in it. Workaround: 1) Search for tar 2) Ctrl+I to call up Filter bar 3) Filter the result with .tar or Use KFind (which is not installed by default by many major distros including Kubuntu) This problem makes precise searching in Dolphin very confusing and troublesome. Is it possible for Dolphin to respect wildcards? Or can we let it to at least respect the period symbol so we can at least have an easy workaround? Thank you.
If you don't have baloo enabled, kio_filenamesearch is used, which doesn't support wildcards (never did, AFAICS), for regex: . matches any one character .* matches any number of characters \. matches a literal '.' character for example: .*tar\.xz will only match foobar.tar.xz
I can confirm that ., .\, and .* seem to work, but .*tar\.xz does not appear to match foobar.tar.xz on my machine. Operating System: KDE neon 5.23 KDE Plasma Version: 5.23.2 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.86.0 Qt Version: 5.15.3 Kernel Version: 5.4.0-89-generic (64-bit) Graphics Platform: X11 Processors: 12 × AMD Ryzen 5 2600 Six-Core Processor Memory: 15.6 GiB of RAM Graphics Processor: GeForce GT 1030/PCIe/SSE2
I stumbled upon this behavior yesterday and IMO it is very confusing to users and took me some time to analyze: In short: baloo enabled (default): basic wildcard search (like *.jpg for all jpg files) works ONLY for indexed folders but wildcards don't work for non indexed folders and network shares mounted via dolphin baloo disabled: basic wildcards never work (*.jpg no results) The documentation https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/dolphin/dolphin/quick-tips.html specificially states that wildcards should yield the same results as without wildcards "The search is case insensitive, and does not require surrounding wildcards (*foo* and foo are equivalent), but you can use wildcards inside the search term. * will match zero or more characters, ? only one single character." Expected fix: the search provider for everything that is not baloo indexed (I guess this is kio_filenamesearch) should support wildcards, like searching in baloo indexed folders does. the search syntax should be identical. having different search results depending on search location is confusing and feels unreliable. I want to be able to trust the file search. Sure, using regex could be a workaround for advanced users, but is only necessary for those non-indexed folders or when baloo is disabled. you have to specifically know this behavior and regex is not user friendly, a basic *.jpg search should always work, like it does in mlocate or windows Dolphin 23.04.01 and KDE 5.27.5 on Gentoo