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@mitchellh mitchellh commented Dec 4, 2024

Towards #189

This PR implements a simple, single-threaded, single-direction Booyer-Moore-Horspool search on top of PageList.

The code in this PR is not utilized in builds yet. It is only part of unit tests. I want to open a PR incrementally so we don't have one mega PR for search. I want to be very clear that this does not finish #189, there's many more steps before that.

High-level technical overview: we maintain a circular buffer of UTF-8 encoded terminal page contents that is just large enough to fit the larger of a single page or the search term. As we search, the circular buffer is pruned and additional terminal pages are added to search. This minimizes our memory usage to the minimum necessary for this approach. In practice, the overhead is very small for realistic search terms!

Some limitations that need to be resolved in future work:

  • Single-direction: We only search oldest-to-newest. We'll want to search newest-to-oldest by default. It shouldn't be hard to implement directionality but I wanted to wait until I needed it.
  • Single-threaded: Search only works as long as the PageList is not being actively modified. That's not going to work for a real final user-facing solution.

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Going to merge this. This isn't in use at all yet so there's no potential harm here in a merge. I'll still be notified and read any feedback if anyone has any. Then I'll plan follow ups to keep working on this...

@mitchellh mitchellh merged commit 711f947 into main Dec 4, 2024
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@mitchellh mitchellh deleted the search branch December 4, 2024 21:48
@mitchellh mitchellh mentioned this pull request Dec 4, 2024
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mitchellh added a commit that referenced this pull request Nov 14, 2025
Chugging along towards #189

This adds significantly more internal work for searching. A long time
ago, I added #2885 which had a hint of what I was thinking of. This
simultaneously builds on this and changes direction.

The change of direction is that instead of making PageList fully
concurrency safe and having a search thread access it concurrently, I'm
now making an architectural shift where our search thread will grab the
big lock (blocking all IO/rendering), but with the bet that we can make
our critical areas small enough and time them well enough that the
performance hit while actively searching will be minimal. **Results yet
to be seen, but the path to implement this is much, much simpler.**

## Rearchitecting Search

To that end, this PR builds on #2885 by making `src/terminal/search` and
entire package (rather than a single file).

```mermaid
graph TB
    subgraph Layer5 ["<b>Layer 5: Thread Orchestration</b>"]
        Thread["<b>Thread</b><br/>━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━<br/>• MPSC queue management<br/>• libxev event loop<br/>• Message handling<br/>• Surface mailbox communication<br/>• Forward progress coordination"]
    end
    
    subgraph Layer4 ["<b>Layer 4: Screen Coordination</b>"]
        ScreenSearch["<b>ScreenSearch</b><br/>━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━<br/>• State machine (tick + feed)<br/>• Result caching<br/>• Per-screen (alt/primary)<br/>• Composes Active + History search<br/>• Interrupt handling"]
    end
    
    subgraph Layer3 ["<b>Layer 3: Domain-Specific Search</b>"]
        ActiveSearch["<b>ActiveSearch</b><br/>━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━<br/>• Active area only<br/>• Invalidate & re-search<br/>• Small, volatile data"]
        
        PageListSearch["<b>PageListSearch</b><br/>━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━<br/>• History search (reverse order)<br/>• Separated tick/feed ops<br/>• Immutable PageList assumption<br/>• Garbage pin detection"]
    end
    
    subgraph Layer2 ["<b>Layer 1: Primitive Operations</b>"]
        SlidingWindow["<b>SlidingWindow</b><br/>━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━<br/>• Manual linked list node management<br/>• Circular buffer maintenance<br/>• Zero-allocation search<br/>• Match yielding<br/>• Page boundary handling"]
    end
    
    Thread --> ScreenSearch
    ScreenSearch --> ActiveSearch
    ScreenSearch --> PageListSearch
    ActiveSearch --> SlidingWindow
    PageListSearch --> SlidingWindow
    
    classDef layer5 fill:#0a0a0a,stroke:#ff0066,stroke-width:3px,color:#ffffff
    classDef layer4 fill:#0f0f0f,stroke:#ff6600,stroke-width:3px,color:#ffffff
    classDef layer3 fill:#141414,stroke:#ffaa00,stroke-width:3px,color:#ffffff
    classDef layer2 fill:#1a1a1a,stroke:#00ff00,stroke-width:3px,color:#ffffff
    
    class Thread layer5
    class ScreenSearch layer4
    class ActiveSearch,PageListSearch layer3
    class SlidingWindow layer2
    
    style Layer5 fill:#050505,stroke:#ff0066,stroke-width:2px,color:#ffffff
    style Layer4 fill:#080808,stroke:#ff6600,stroke-width:2px,color:#ffffff
    style Layer3 fill:#0c0c0c,stroke:#ffaa00,stroke-width:2px,color:#ffffff
    style Layer2 fill:#101010,stroke:#00ff00,stroke-width:2px,color:#ffffff
```

Within the package, we have composable layers that let us test each
point:

- `SlidingWindow`: The lowest layer, the caller manually adds linked
list page nodes and it maintains a sliding window we search over,
yielding results without allocation (besides the circular buffers to
maintain the sliding window).
- `PageListSearch`: Searches a PageList structure in reverse order
(assumption: more recent matches are more valuable than older), but
separates out the `tick` (search, but no PageList access) and `feed`
(PageList access, prep data for search but don't search) operations.
This lets us `feed` in a critical area and `tick` outside. **This
assumes an immutable PageList, so this is for history.**
- `ActiveSearch`: Searches only the active area of a PageList. The
expectation is that the active area changes much more regularly, but it
is also very small (relative to scrollback). Throws away and re-searches
the active area as necessary.
- `ScreenSearch`: Composes the previous three components to coordinate
searching an active terminal screen. You'd have one of these per screen
(alt vs primary). This also caches results unlike the other components,
with the expectation that the caller will revisit the results as screens
change (so if you switch from neovim back to your shell and vice versa
with a search active, it won't start over).
- `Thread`: A dedicated search thread that will receive messages via
MPSC queues while managing the forward progress of a `ScreenSearch` and
sending matches back to the surface mailbox for apprt rendering. **The
thread component is not functional, just boilerplate, in this PR.**

ScreenSearch is a state machine that moves in an iterative `tick` +
`feed` fashion. This will let us "interrupt" the search with updates on
the search thread (read our mailbox via libxev loops for example) and
will let us minimize critical areas with locks (only `feed`).

Each component is significantly unit tested, especially around page
boundary cases. Given the complexity, there is no way this is perfect,
but the architecture is such that we can easily add regression tests as
we find issues.

## Other Changes, Notes

The only change to actually used code is that tracked pins in a
`PageList` can now be flagged as "garbage." A garbage tracked pin is one
that had to be moved in a non-sensical way because the previous location
it tracked has been deleted. This is used by the searcher to detect that
our history was pruned.

**If my assumption about the big lock is wrong** and this ends up being
godawful for performance, then it should still be okay because more
granular locking and reference counting such as that down by @dave-fl in
#8850 can be pushed into these components and reused. So this work is
still valuable on its own.

## Future

This PR is still just a bunch of internals, split out into its own PR so
I don't make one huge 10K diff PR. There are a number of future tasks:

- Flesh out `ScreenSearch` and hook it up to `Thread`
- Pull search thread management into `Surface` (or possibly the render
thread or shared render state since active area changes can be
synchronized with renderer frame rebuilds. Not sure yet.)
- Send updates back to the surface thread so that apprts can update UI.
- Apprt actions, input bindings, etc. to hook this all up (the easy
part, really).

The next step is to continue to flesh out the `ScreenSearch` as required
and hook it up to `Thread`.

**AI disclosure:** AI reviewed the code and assisted with some tests,
but didn't write any of the logic or design. This is beyond its ability
(or my ability to spec it out clearly enough for AI to succeed).
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