Re: Seeking suggestions for pet project

[Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> Your description of the awk script sounds cool.  I haven't tried it
> yet, though.  I haven't made up my mind how to display the list of
> occurrences.  It's a good idea to do that, but the user interface
> isn't clear to me.  Hm.

What I keep thinking is that it could be very similar to the interface
involved in `M-x grep'.  A buffer pops up containg the hits with
hypertext links leading to that hit in the actual file.  It can't
really get much better than that.  And like you say that might be
enough. 

However that misses out on the very nice functions of nnir where the
whole article is available and the ability to transport to the
thread.  Putting those two together would really by dynomite.

I don't know enough to look at the code for M-x grep, and see the
mechanics but I'm thinking for this search engines purposes that at
the same time nnir is generating the summary buffer, a very similar
(read identicle) buffer to the one created with M-x grep could be
generated but no popup.  The user would call it forth when desired
with C-x b.  Other wise it would die a natural death when the
ephemeral nnir buffer is closed.

Another possibility would be to somehow hylite the hits within the
nnir generated messages.  Not as usefull as the first approach though.

I'm probably getting carried away here but I'm also thinking how this
search engine could be used to pull other kinds of files into a fake
summary buffer.  Something similar to the way one can `import' any
text file into a gnus group by letting gnus generate headers for it,
and view it as a message. (gnus-summary-import-article).  Only
into an ephemeral nnir summary buffer.