Allow to search for parts of words

[yennor]

Your use case

What would you like to do?

If I enter a search string, I want every chat message to be shown where that string appears even if it's only part of a word. Right now it only searchs for whole words.

Why would you like to do it?

In english it halfway works looking only for whole words (even there it's problematic, plural, past ...), but in languages like german where wordendings (also nouns) can change a lot and in different ways depending on the context it's just impossible to search for every possibility. There you usually just want to search for the word base (hoping that this one didn't change, which could also happen but not that frequently).

How would you like to achieve it?

well. also show results where the search string is only part of a word. you could also make a check box for "only find whole words)

Have you considered any alternatives?

No response

Additional context

No response

[t3chguy]

This behaviour is dependent on your Matrix server, on matrix.org it uses Postgres FTS

[yennor]

I'm using synapse which is using postgres. But if it uses postgres fts it would mean that messages are stored in cleartext???

[t3chguy]

The server is only used for search of cleartext events, local search of encrypted rooms is only possible in Element Desktop which uses seshat https://github.com/matrix-org/seshat

[yennor]

ok, in that case my feature request is for element-desktop. I completely forgot that I never search for anything on my phone, since it just doesn't work there... But like that with only supporting whole word search in general I also can't find anything on element-desktop...
so you're telling me I should make a feature request on seshat? or does it already support it and element just makes a call looking only for whole words?

[t3chguy]

Most full text search indexers only support full word search because that's how they build the index, partial-word search wouldn't be as efficiently indexable

[yennor]

I understand that. It doesn't change my feature request though. In certain languages it's very difficult to search only on whole words (In swiss german it's worse, wordendings can change depending on from which region the writer is).

[t3chguy]

Right, but FTS also has a feature called language stemming, where it doesn't index the exact word but rather its stem. So worrying would be indexed as worry, same with worried, worriedly etc, so all of those map to any of them.

So maybe what you want is better language stemming support in Seshat and/or Synapse rather than "Allow to search for parts of words"