timothy's Journal: Complaints! No. 3: Synaptic's baffling "Quick Search"

Preface: Yes, I complain a lot, but in this case like many others, I complain about things that I truly like quite a bit overall, but that I think could be much better than they are.

That said, here's my complaint about Synaptic, a mostly excellent graphical front-end to the Apt package manager: I can't figure out what "Quick Search" means, or why it's separate from "Search."

"Quick Search" is a nicely visible option when you run Synaptic; there's a text-entry field and a button for Quick Search. Since "Search" (just plain "Search") is available as a menu item next to Quick Search, I wonder what the point is. I'm sure there's something about this I don't get. Does Quick Search only search some subset of the available data? If so, how is it narrowed down? And why does Quick Search usually seem to get back exactly nothing, while the regular Search finds what I want?

Example: There's a set of four like-sized pictures I'd like to combine into one bigger picture. Sure, I could do this (somewhat laboriously) in The Gimp, but I know that ImageMagick already has a built-in function for doing this with a small dose of command line. Since I don't think this machine has ImageMagick installed, I fire up Synaptic and refresh the package information.

Then I type "magick" into the Quick Search box; results: nothing.

But if I select "search" instead, and do the same search, I get a nice list of results. Turns out, I already have ImageMagick installed (good).

As an experiment, I just ran the same search as before via Quick Search: *now* QuickSearch shows the same results as does the regular search. I wonder if this would have been true the other times I've been baffled by the blank results from Quick Search (that is, that the Quick Search would have succeeded, if I'd already run a regular search), but even if so, What's the difference?

Confusing, I say.

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Aside: Making a 2x2 grid from 4 identically sized rectangular images is not hard, but not especially intuitive, either, at least not to me. Here's a generalized version of the command that worked, based on the example at the ImageMagick site:
$ montage file01.jpg file02.jpg file03.jpg file04.jpg --geometry +2+2 outputfilename.jpg