How do I switch from the new Unity Search system to the old one?

Greetings, I am very happy with the new developments of Unity technologies, but the new Unity search engine is crude and does not provide convenience and work opportunities compared to the old one, for example: I can’t simultaneously select all the materials found and change the shader, as well as other file types that slip when searching by material type (((, the old type selection function is saved in the editor, but the ability to search through certain project folders has disappeared, please tell me how to return the old search engine?

7353323--894962--ААА.png

I would like to know this as well

In an effort to add more workflows we dont want, they broke our current way of working!

Snarky remarks aside, try doing bugreports or writing in the quick search forum .

It is possible, there’s an option to select a “legacy” search engine for each type of item deep in the Search settings. Imagine my surprise when it was no longer possible to say “only search in ” after searching with the new search. Fortunately, for the time being, it was possible to deactivate.

Unity Search really is pretty garbage, sadly. It does 90% more features now, none of which are the ones I’d really have needed, and half of which I would rather actively NOT want to be run on my project or contextual situations.

And it keeps juddering and breaking and glitching out so much, it’s definitely not ripe for a release and should honestly be pulled from the 2021 and 2020 streams. Possibly pending a full redesign.

1 Like

I totally agree! A new search, but there is no such important function, why did they remove the ability to use it in the old search, it’s strange…

You can restore the legacy/classic search engine through the search settings:

7413701--906719--upload_2021-8-12_18-56-21.png

Sorry about that. The intent was not to mess things up. I understand not all users need a better search workflow to ship their game, but many users requested improved search workflows and based on analytics, many users use the new search workflows actively and seems to be enjoying them. But you are right we shouldn’t have changed the current project browser search functionality and this is now reverted to the classic search engine in 2021.2.

I am sad to hear this. I would really like to know which search workflow you have needed? Maybe it is there and I can help you setup things for it. Lets work together to make things better if you want.

If you have some concrete examples, please share them or submit a bug report and I will promptly look at it.

I do not think we will fully redesign the new search window, but we can surely improve it based on your feedback.

The latest design has a panel to save queries, an embedded inspector and a search table in which you can build complete report for your project:

7413701--906725--upload_2021-8-12_19-5-20.png

7413701--906722--upload_2021-8-12_19-2-30.png

5 Likes

The new search filters are nice, and some of them would certainly be useful on occasion, but most of what I need, almost exclusively, is searching for stuff within a certain folder (recursively). I tried various search strings in the new search and felt almost stupid I can’t figure out how to do it, but from this thread, it seems the feature was never there…
Most often, I want to look for things of a certain type or specific name, within my own folders (i.e. not external assets from the Asset Store, not packages, not unrelated things made by other team members…).

2 Likes

I dislike new search beacuse building search indices(index file size 360mb)for large project is toooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo slow.

1 Like

We could add right click on a folder and open a search window to start searching within that folder. For now, here’s how you could filter stuff in a specific folder. That said we can certainly improve on that side for that specific workflow.

7421837--908255--upload_2021-8-16_9-0-48.png

7421837--908261--upload_2021-8-16_9-2-36.png

So the idea is to put in quotes (in case of spaces) the folder name and append other filters and or words.

For this I suggest you setup your indexes by excluding stuff you do not care about, or by settings the proper roots of things you only care about. Here’s an example:

7421837--908276--upload_2021-8-16_9-19-35.png

Ok understood. There is many ways to setup your indexes for very large projects. If you are available (reach me in a private conversation if interested), I could setup a call with you to show you how. Also, you can still benefit from the new search workflow without setuping an index by using the Asset Database (adb:) or Find (find:) providers.

7421837--908279--upload_2021-8-16_9-21-27.png

The search is a bit slower, but it doesn’t require any indexing. You can easily setup a custom shortcut to open the Find Provider only in the shortcut manager.

7421837--908282--upload_2021-8-16_9-22-29.png

1 Like

Another way to read this is that based on analytics, a lot of people don’t know you can change the search behaviour in the preferences yet.

Defaults matter. If you wanted to brag about how people like and use it, you should have defaulted to the old one, and then if a lot of people started migrating to new one because of how awesome it is, then you would have reasons to celebrate.

2 Likes

I was talking about the new search window and not the project browser integration. But you are right, the search engine settings are unknown for many, but now the defaults are back to the classic/legacy search engine.

That is the case in >=2021.2 and we are tracking the analytics for this now.

Shouldn’t you provide a pop-up when creating a project/starting the project with this package for the first time to choose the search engine, otherwise the new search functionality will go unnoticed by most of the newcomers or simply who aren’t actively looking for it.

First use popups can be very annoying for built-in modules, that is why we didn’t went that route. Also we’ve learned that most users didn’t want or expect that the project browser search integration to be different from previous versions, so that is why we’ve step back from this so it is an opt-in workflow integration for the users that really wants to use the new search features in the project browser (at least for >=2021.2). But you are right it is not well exposed.

Thinking about it, we could bring back the Search Index Wizard we had in the com.unity.quicksearch 2.0.0 version but as a menu item that the user can execute if he wants some assistance to setup search indexes and preferences.

2 Likes

That would indeed be useful :slight_smile:

Is there any documentation on this?
I also would like to know how to setup this for big projects.

Unfortunately there is no specific documentation for large project at https://docs.unity3d.com/2021.2/Documentation/Manual/search-overview.html.

I will work with the documentation team to add a new section specific to large project, but since this might take a lot of time, meanwhile I will write a small blog post to share some tips for large project. I’ll let you know when this first post is available.

Thanks,

3 Likes

Thanks for the tips, and really hope such effective communication and response from Unity could also be seen in DOTS forum.

4 Likes

Booo!

QS has probably been one of the biggest improvements to the workflow in Unity the last few years. It still has issues, but those are fixable and are nothing like the utter agony of requiring perfect prefix matches in the old search engine.

Editing any Preferences is a power-user move, which means that reverting back to old search by default leaves all non-power users with a bad search engine.

3 Likes

They should have a poll for this(in forum) or a survey. XD

Maybe just bring a single time annoying pop-up to solve it for everyone :p.

Hi Baste, I understand your point, but from our point of view, it is very hard to find the balance. What please some users, is disliked by other users, and often vocal ones. At some point we would really like to have only one search engine, but we still have some homework to do and fix some integration points in the core of Unity.

Thanks for the feedback.

We are currently discussing some new strategies for this in our team. We’ll let you know when we have something to try out.

2 Likes