find does not match text with upper case characters

[gonter]

This problem was noticed on Ubuntu 17.10 which comes with Tomboy 1.15.9.

Consider a note file with this content:

TEST0
Test1
test2
TEst3

searching for "test", "TEST" or "Test" only finds test2, while searching for "st" finds Test1, test2 and TEst3. "TEST0" can never be found.

I assume, this is caused by lowercasing the search word in PerformSearch() in NoteWindow.cs line 1040, while in FindMatchesInBuffer() (line 1220) the original buffer is used. The note_text string seems to have been prepared for the match-operation, but is never used. Commenting out the toLower() in line 1040 produces a case sensitive search which finds all strings.

[jeremybmerrill]

Can confirm this is an issue for me too. Likewise on 1.15.9 and Ubuntu 17.10. This is a regression, no?

[bastik]

I know you guys are working on tomboy-ng, but would you accept a pull request to fix this bug? It is somewhat frustrating when search is not working properly.

[davidbannon]

Sorry Bastik, its not actually like that ! I'm working on tomboy-ng partially because the people who were working on Tomboy are finding it somewhat harder to maintain of late, mainly due to upstream library issues. I don't have authority to do anything with Tomboy itself. I hope that someone who does is still monitoring this repo but don't know for sure.

Now, if you have built a pull request and tested it, doesn't that mean you have built a binary that you like already ? Why aren't you using that ?

(I hope to have a new release of -ng out soon, lot more flexible (and faster) searching included. But right now, ironically, an upstream bug .....)

David

[bastik]

I have not actually started to make any changes.

It would be too much effort just to fix it for myself, but if there was a chance to get it into a release eventually, then I would give it a go.

[mlncn]

This is a major bug—searching all notes for Edward will find a note with that name in its body, but trying to search within that note for Edward, edward, or whatever will fail—and so needs to get into a release.

[KingstonCoder]

I have the same issue with Tomboy 1.15.9 (as supplied with Linux Mint 19) I can do a high level search to identify notes which contain a search term, but searching within that note for anything that contains an uppercase letter gives no results (eg. Audio won't be found whether I search for Audio or audio. Searching for udio will find all references to audio, Audio etc - along with lots of other unwanted results like studio etc. I have made extensive use of Tomboy for many years and this broken search is a real problem in a program whose key function is information storage and retrieval. Does anyone know if this is likely to be corrected anytime soon - it is almost a year since the bug was raised here? Thanks

[ajhepple]

Jeremy is right, this does seem to be a regression. The issue is not present in my Tomboy 1.15.4 on Ubuntu 16.04.

[davidbannon]

KC, I am afraid its unlikely this matter will be fixed. There are, as far as I know, no active developers of Tomboy right now. I'd love to be proved wrong. As near as I can tell, there have been no code contributions since Alex announced his withdrawal.

Might to be worth going back over the history and see if using 1.15.4 is a better option ?

Or tomboy-ng, searching does work as you would expect.

If someone has a patch, I 'might' have sufficient authority to apply it but even if I did have that authority, I'd not be able to test it properly so would be quite concerned. On the other hand, is the best thing we can do is roll back to 1.15.4 so distributions pulling Tomboy, get a working search engine ?

Only if we could establish the 'fixes' since 1.15.4 are a lot less important that the searching .....

David

[KingstonCoder]

Hi David, Thanks for your thoughtful response, it sounds a bit of a minefield. Doing anything about it is beyond my abilities I'm afraid, I'm more user than coder these days, though its frustrating to think it is likely to be a fairly straightforward fix (judging by Gonter's original post, and previous coding experience). Meanwhile I will take a look at tomboy-ng and other note-taking options, though I've never found anything else that so perfectly balances functionality with simplicity of use.

Thanks, Andy

[alex-ter]

I can take a look at the proposed patch if that's really a problem and moving to tomboy-ng (the recommended path) is not an option.

I have to warn you it may take me several weeks to process that. I only have time on weekends these days and even that is highly limited + I'm not sure how broken my Tomboy dev setup is, I haven't touched it for months. But if that's that problematic for enough people, I'm willing to do that for old times' sake :)

[tissatussa]

I have the same problem on Ubuntu 17.10 which comes with Tomboy 1.15.9. I installed GNote and all is solved ! GNote is a fork of TomBoy in C++. It took all my TomBoy notes after installation, so i didn't have to import my TomBoy notes !? Very nice .. and the search function is fully working !

[KingstonCoder]

Hi Alex, I'm not sure if git forums are places mainly for developers, or if users are welcome? My input is purely as a user, so apologies if that is inappropriate. I saw your post elsewhere saying you were having to pull back from Tomboy development, and I see your offer (above) to put in time in to fix the search issue hasn't generated much enthusiasm. From the point of view of someone who makes extensive daily use of Tomboy I would love for it to work properly again. But if it is unlikely to survive long in its original form (with support) and there really aren't huge numbers of people crying out for this fix then I guess it's not a very rewarding use of your time and energy. Seems a shame to me, but I am just one voice. I read around the issues that have hampered original Tomboy, and the work David is doing with tomboy-ng which sounds very interesting. At this stage - as someone who has committed everything I have learned about Linux over the years (plus a ton of other gubbins) - to Tomboy my concern is that whatever I use to access those notes remains supported and doesn't chew them up. Davids warnings about tomboy-ng being far from stable or finished are enough to rule it out for daily use (for me) at the moment, though I will definitely take a look and experiment with non-essential data. Very grateful for all that you guys do anyway, I wish my greying head was still up to grappling with the complexities of software development, but these days hacking out bash scripts are about my limit! Andy

[davidbannon]

Actually Andy,my warnings about -ng "far from stable" are a bit outdated. I use it routinely and am aware of a number of other people who are also doing so. I have recently reinstalled Tomboy on one of my machines running some regression tests against a new sync engine for -ng and have to say, all modesty aside, tomboy-ng is already as stable, is more feature rich and it a lot more communicative.

But no netsync ! Yet. We are working on it !

Andy, I personally don't care how you communicate about Tomboy, we have probably strayed off the topic on this thread but the important thing is you have had your say !

Davo

[KingstonCoder]

Thanks Davo, nice to be made welcome! :) And thanks for the reassurance re. tomboy-ng's state of readiness, I have downloaded it and had a play using a copy of my Tomboy data. Where is the best place to feed back observations and - heaven forbid - possible bugs?

Andy

[davidbannon]

Possible bugs ? there are no "possible bugs" - "certain bugs", sure, bound to be more in there.... :-) Up a level from here to tomboy-ng branch. https://github.com/tomboy-notes/tomboy-ng/issues

[KingstonCoder]

Ha, thanks :)) I'll take a look. Andy