TDX_SearchPalette

TDX_SearchPalette #

Adds a search field to TouchDesigner's palette browser, so palette components can be found by typing instead of scrolling the folder tree. This is Yea Chen's TD-SearchPalette, vendored into the toolkit.

The component installs itself into the palette on project start while Auto Install is on (the toggle roams with your config), and can be installed or removed at any time with the Install / Uninstall pulses on its parameters.

Search hotkey #

ctrl+shift+f (cmd+shift+f on macOS) brings TD's own palette tab to the front and focuses the search field, ready to type.

It acts on the palette in place. It deliberately does not call ui.openPaletteBrowser(), which pops the palette out into a floating window — so if the browser is closed, the hotkey does nothing rather than rearranging your workspace.

The tab step matters because the search field lives inside the stock palette list, and any contributed tab hides that list. The hotkey asks whichever palette-tab owner is installed to show TD's own tab again (FNS_PaletteRegistry and TDXLU's own injector are both feature-detected, neither required), then takes focus one frame later — a tab switched back this frame is still hidden.

Rebindable. The combo lives on this package's own Search Hotkey parameter, so it is listed under TDX_SearchPalette in FNS_HotkeyManager and can be changed there or on the parameter directly; Reset to Default restores ctrl+shift+f. It used to live in MY_HOTKEYS; keeping it with the tool that owns the field means uninstalling this package takes its hotkey with it.

Search behavior #

Matching goes beyond the original module's prefix search:

• Substring, case-insensitive — blur finds hsvBlur, radialBlur and barrel_blur, not just names that start with it.
• Multiple words AND together — audio an finds audioAnalysis.
• Ranked results — an exact match first, then names starting with the query, then names where it starts a word (blur puts hsvBlur and barrel_blur above unblurred), then the rest, alphabetical within each group.
• Wildcards still work — a word carrying * or ? is matched as a pattern, anchored at the front only, so a wildcard can only ever widen the search: audio* is still classic prefix search, *fee finds feedbackGen just like plain fee does, and web*ser finds webBrowser.
• Exclude with - — a word prefixed with a minus removes matches rather than requiring them: blur -barrel finds every blur except the barrel_blur pair.
• Fuzzy fallback — when nothing matches literally, each word is re-read as a subsequence, so initials find the component: fbg finds feedbackGen, wbrsr finds webBrowser. These only ever appear when the strict search came up empty, ranked tightest-match first.
• Folder search — a word containing / matches the palette folder instead of the name: gen/ noise finds noise in the Generators folder, and tools/ alone lists a whole folder. Toggleable via the Folder Search parameter.
• Latest version only — numbered copies of one component (tool, tool1, tool2, or the same name in two folders) collapse to the latest-modified file. Toggleable via the Latest Version Only parameter.

The list stops at 200 rows, so a one-character query returns the 200 best-ranked components rather than the whole palette.

Clicking a folder in the tree clears the search, so the list falls back to that folder's own contents instead of leaving a stale query in front of what you just picked. The X button next to the field still clears it without changing folder.