Remain filter functionality especially the "sort by pobularity/rating/recent" for searching in sources

[IceAsteroid]

Describe your suggested feature

In Tachiyomi deriviations, it supports searching while remaining the filter, including the "sort by" feature, which the searched comics can be sorted by either pobularity/rating/recent.

[Fix typo]: But in Kotatsu, it can only filter when not searching, when searching some keywords, it's not able to filter, only a second-level option at the top right corner to display searched comics by different list modes.

Since it's not always that the user has a dedicated comic to search for, for example, I don't know what particular comic to look for, but I'm looking for a particular author, or probably for the author also with keywords to search, and it's nice to have "sort by" feature to sort most popular comics of the author at first.

Note: It seems that different sources' filter features are different, the repository for sources is from "keiyoushi" in Github, which I should probably not list here

Here are some screenshots of TachiJ2K to show what I meant:

MangeDex

NHentai

Acknowledgements

• This is not a duplicate of an existing issue. Please look through the list of open issues before creating a new one.

[IceAsteroid]

@Koitharu
@MariusAlbrecht

Hi, guys, greetings.

Would this feature be implemented? This feature request issue page has been sinking since then.

As described before, this feature is also supported by other tachiyomi derivations, so it's reasonable and also a very useful feature.

[MariusAlbrecht]

Hi, there doesn't seem to be a decision against it. I personally am definitely in favour of better search functionality.

Would the filter you're imagining be restricted to only one source?

If so, that'd mean the user would navigate to a source and then get the ability to search with filters. Doing this would kind of solve the problem of which filters are available (just display those that are) and would also mean no duplicates get displayed. Imo it'd make for a worse overall experience and discoverability though, most users probably don't really care about which source they're using as long as they can find nice manga.

If not, that'd mean we have to deal with different filter availability across sources but get better behaviour if it works out.

[IceAsteroid]

Hi, @MariusAlbrecht, thank you for paying the attention!

I'd prefer the first method. Here's the reason:

1. Sources have their own different options for search. It's hard to implement for search with options for all sources when they have different options. For instance, some may not have options that others have. As I've shown in the description with screenshots.
2. It's arguable in my opinion that "search with options for all active sources" is more efficient in use compared to "search with option in the current source". Here's why, identical duplicates of manga of the same. And plus the first reason, it sacrifices particular sources' search functionalities.

Personally, I tend to use a few sources for a specific category of manga, so when I do not get the results I want in a source, I would go to other sources, but most of the time, I only need to go to one more source if I don't get the results from previous one.

Possible suggestions:

1. Let each source have their own search filters with their specific filter options to have best search functionality for a source.
2. Have a basic filter to search in all sources, the filter remains basic by providing features like "Popular/Trending/Latest", but as I said, some particular sources may have different options or quirks for search filters, making them hard to organize into one.
3. [Edit] Add an option for the user to choose, whether to search in all sources or in current source where the manga is at, based on aforementioned suggestions, when the user selects on the artist tag; an other tag; type in the source UI and start to search with filter or actions like these

The primary goal is to search keywords while the "Popular/Trending/Latest" filter option is taking effect.

This is just my understanding, sorry if anything I said is wrong.

[MariusAlbrecht]

The overall filter capability supported by Kotatsu's parsers is quite strong already. Mangadex is a good example I think.

Right now there's two separate search UIs. One which searches all sources (accessed by the top search bar) and one which searches a specific source (accessed by clicking on that specific source).

I see the following problems:

1. the all-sources search doesn't support filters at all
2. the one-source search supports EITHER search by keywords/text OR filtering. I think that's not aligned with the sources' capabilities.
3. the 2 UIs don't differ enough imo, I like the source-specific UI in your screenshots. I think that should be a separate issue tho

solving these should also align with your wishes (?)

@Koitharu (sorry for the ping) thoughts? Mainly: is search+filters possible with the current parser api?
I could work on this, I know Kotlin but have never worked on android apps and don't really understand the structure of this one. I'd appreciate some pointers in that regard, what Classes/Files/Packages I should probably take a look at.

[IceAsteroid]

Yes, that's basically it.

However, even Popular/Trending/Latest filter option is different between sources.

[IceAsteroid]

TachiyomiJ2K covers all the search features that are described here. I think it's a very good instance to learn from. Plus it's more comprehensive.

Maybe you should try the program to know what I mean. the search functionality of it is really good. Except, that it doesn't have the preview UI that's been added in Kotatsu, that's why I'm using Kotatsu.

TachiyomiJ2K's search workflow:

• Clicking on a tag in a comic's description UI shows four options Copy, Search _current-source_, Search library and Search global(which searches in all sources).

• If clicking on the artist tag, it will trigger search in the global search UI, which searches in all sources, after that, when the user clicks in a source, the source-specific search UI will show results with filter functionality enabled.

All these two programs are good in some way.

[IceAsteroid]

Thank you, the project's owner Koitharu, and MariusAlbrecht and all the contributors.

The new features are working great.