gnome-search-tool should allow queries to be saved

Binary package hint: gnome-utils

Ubuntu release: Karmic (9.10)
Package: gnome-utils 2.28.1-0ubuntu1

The gnome-search-tool is a great utility to give the power of commandline searching to non-techie users. However, what you typically want to give them is not just the utility, but the search itself. Therefore, the gnome-search-tool should allow a search query to be saved and assigned an alias. That way, the end user can just click on the name and get the results they need without having to construct the search from scratch every time.

As it turns out, this tool already supports this feature, in a way. The gnome-search-tool command provides commandline flags for every field in the user interface. This allows me to create a .desktop file that calls gnome-search-tool using my prepared query. So all the user interface needs to do is offer a way to generate a .desktop file from the current search and prompt the user for a name. The file can be saved to the desktop and the search can be run by clicking (or double-clicking) on it.

Here's an example .desktop file that searches for songs less than a month old.

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Icon[en_US]=/usr/share/icons/Humanity/actions/48/search.svg
Name[en_US]=Find New Songs
Exec=gnome-search-tool --path /home/username/Music --regex ".(mp3|ogg)$" --mtimeless=30 --sortby date --start
Comment[en_US]=Search for songs less than 30 days old
Name=Find New Songs
Comment=Search for songs less than 30 days old
Icon=/usr/share/icons/Humanity/actions/48/search.svg