Introducing: Comprehensive admin search

[martin (Martin Brennan)]

Ever since we introduced the admin sidebar, our long term goal has been to bring a more comprehensive search to the admin interface that helps admins and moderators find exactly what they need without having to dig through many pages and settings manually.

This method is so much faster than the old way, and we are excited to see if it helps you navigate the admin interface more efficiently .

Finding what you’re looking for

You can launch a quick search from anywhere in the admin interface with the shortcut Ctrl+/ , or on macOS, ⌘ +/ . This will bring up a window like this:

You will see here that there are several different checked boxes beneath the input. These are the types of things you can search from here:

• Pages - Every page in the admin interface, including sub-pages not shown in the sidebar, and plugin pages
• Settings - Every site setting, which includes the setting description and keywords
• Themes - Every installed theme, whether they are enabled or disabled
• Components - Every installed theme component, whether they are enabled or disabled
• Reports - Every admin report, which includes a description of the report

You can click these boxes to filter out the various types of search results. Here are some examples of each:

Pages

Settings

Themes

Components

Reports

You can also visit a full page version of the search by pressing Enter when results are being shown, or by clicking “Search” in the admin sidebar, which will take you to /admin/search.

Enabling admin search

You can turn this feature on with the experimental admin search enabled groups setting, which you can find in the Experimental config page at /admin/config/experimental:

Note that when this feature is enabled, the keyboard shortcut for the admin sidebar filter is used for the search instead.

Testing and sharing your feedback

We are opening up this feature for feedback now, please post in this topic if you have any or if you notice any bugs that need to be fixed. At this time, we won’t be going much deeper into improvements for this search, but we will make it as good as we can in its current state.

That being said, there are some known limitations or improvements to be made:

• There is currently no ranking of search results, they are returned in the same order as the types of results (e.g. Pages, Settings, Themes, Components, Reports)
• The fuzzyness of searching is pretty basic, but is usually good enough to find what you need if you vaguely know the name
• When you click on a setting, usually it opens a page and filters the site settings on that page, at some point we want a fancier solution which highlights the part of the page you were looking for

[NateDhaliwal]

Thanks for this! Now I won’t need to trawl through the pages of settings to find what I need.

[Arkshine]

Oh wow, I did not see this feature coming! Really cool!
It adds another layer to the admin experience.

I tested it for a few minutes. It works great! It’s super convenient.
The search results are a bit jumpy. I wonder if the search should be higher in a fixed position or not move again to the center. I’m not sure.

The visible focus looks weird:

The transition on the button background makes fast changes a bit trippy and gives a sense of flickering.

[meglio (Anton)]

Consider highlighting the matched search term(s) in the search results.

[patrickemin]

Hi, this shortcut does not works for me on a PC.

[Arkshine]

Have you updated the experimental admin search enabled groups setting?

[patrickemin]

No I did not, just saw this thanks !

[patrickemin]

@martin

/admin/config/experimental

Hi I am on this page :/admin/config/experimental

But I do not see this experimental setting: experimental admin search enabled groups

[Arkshine]

Hmm, odd. Looking at your Discourse version, it should be present. I would rebuild Discourse; maybe I missed a PR that makes it available.

[patrickemin]

Thanks, will try that