cross-room search including 1:1 messages

Created by: trevorah

Created by: trevorah

as requested by @huafu

Thanks @trevorah. I think that one major missing thing in archives globally is the ability to search for some text in the whole archive, not only clicking day per day.

For public rooms, it'll allow for users to search archives before asking a question that has been asked for example. And for both private and public rooms, think about it like some days ago, you discussed about something, you couldn't work on it, and today you need to re-read what has been discussed. Without the search feature, you won't be able to find it quickly if you don't know exactly what day you talked about it.

Long story short:

• Archive for one-to-one chats are as important as room's ones
• Day-per-day isn't very useful, I think search in archives is needed

Thanks for the hard work ;-)

Given that we introduced in-room search, I'm renamed this issue to allow for cross-room search as search effective searches the archives now.

thanks for the reference @mydigitalself

At https://github.com/trailblazer project we use Gitter for support and interaction with other contributors and users. That's about 300 users, with about 40-50 active users. We produce a lot information: code examples, discussion of new features, etc. To find something we talked about a month ago - is almost impossible. A simple full-text search of the archives would do wonders!!!

The lack of simple search - has come up multiuple times. I'm just the first person in a group to complain about. Normally the conversation end with: "Gitter doesn't support search. Oh well". Just cause we don't complain publicly, doesn't mean it doesn't imepede us. All it means - we searched the google and found an answer from gitter, saying that they don't support it. The regular "1 in 13 upset users complains" doesn't apply to programmers.

By the way the suggestion - I've seen in other places- to use google search - doesn't work well

This should return hundreds of results, decently formatted. For me to try to open 200 pages - is not a workable solution. Plus it's not always up to date as it takes time for google to re-index pages.

reform site:gitter.im

@konung The search on the left menu will find messages in your current room from any time(all of the archive, the archives currently are more meant to browse by day). Sorry if you already knew but just wanted to point it out as your reply didn't mention wanting to search across all of your rooms like this issue pertains to.

@MadLittleMods Thank you ! I didn't realize that started working. Last time I tried to use search, it was just searching for rooms and people. Not chat messages.

But a better search interface would still be great. Just dreaming here. Thank you!

@konung Search has always found messages in the current room as well as rooms and people across Gitter.

@MadLittleMods - didn't work for messages as of january, on gitter Windows.