Dear all,
Just a few words about this problem (I'm still on vacations) : Having a search box in the current plug-in is something I don't want to do, mainly because :
1. The plug-in will be probably broken in a near future, as GEGL nodes are coming, and I don't think spending time on new features for the current interface is worth the effort.
My opinion is that the current G'MIC plug-in for GIMP will become obsolete shortly. I'd prefer to have something redesigned to work with GEGL instead.
(garagecoder and jayprich may give their opinions about this as well
).
2. A correct search feature would imply the introduction of 'tags' in the different filters. Searching only for the filter name is probably useless : if you don't remember the location of the filters you are looking for, I don't see why you should remember their exact names. As a result, if we implement a search tool only for the filter name, it won't be so user-friendly and useful at all.
And by the way, introducing tags for filters requires a lot of work : not only for defining the tags for the 400+ filters available, but also to code the whole stuff.
3. And if we just think about finding a filter by its name, there is something simpler to do : open :
http://gmic.sourceforge.net/gimp_filters.txt and do a search in it. This list is intended to be updated every hour (it is automatically generated by a script, even if it seems that the update is broken right now, I will check that when I return). I agree that this is not good-looking as it is, *but* this can be probably improved easily (by adding some html tags in the script output).
To sum up, I'm not a big fan of introducing a new search tool in the current plug-in interface. It will take a lot of time, and won't be more easy to use than opening the list with your browser and do a quick search in the filter list page.