An OS-wide search? Did that work really well in e.g. Windows Vista.. ?

Then I guess it won't get done. I don't know how to do it and can't learn it. I was hoping someone with the know-how would pick it up in brainstorm and implement it, but you're saying brainstorm's useless so I might as well give it up.

@craftguy You're not hijacking the thread, the whole reason I started it was to call atention to this neat little feature of the N900 and how it could be made even better if it were more flexible. I hadn't even thought ofwhat you suggest, sounds like a really cool idea.

Just look at Spotlight on OSX, Gnome-do on Linux, and yes the desktop search feature of windows 7 works fairly well

I believe that the number of things that it'd have to index on the N900 would be small enough to where it's not taxing on the system (ex: contacts, installed applications, bookmarks), not necessarily files (though I suppose it could be expanded to mp3,images,etc?)

Hmm.. I might have to brush up on some Maemo development to get this done..

If someone is thinking on developing something related to this thread, feel free to make use of the following stream of consciousnes:

A nice feature would be like the one in firefox, where one can set user defined keywords for the integrated search engines.

I'd have g for google, for example, so typing "g justin bieber" would open that google search in the browser. With a w instead of a g, I'd look up the aforementioned on wikipedia, instead.

"n whatever" would create a note with the text whatever (and I'd like to have a note-taking app that would put current time and location into the note for context, if I later look at the note and wonder what the heck I meant by "whatever", I could see that at the time I was standing outside a phone store, looking at an ad for the next iphone and thinking "whatever... proprietary lock-in and restricting of freedom makes any shiny/spedy features moot."

"t laundry @16" would program a todo event with the text "laundry" and a deadline at four pm. (could also be entered with date and/or different priorities with different codes...

"d Picking up laundry." could post on my identi.ca (the superior, Free Software micro blogging service) account if I had one.

"c mother" could search contacts for any mention of a mother.

... and so on.

I'll do all this myself as soon as I get my pathological procrastination/lying under control and learn how to program. So, feel free to beat me to it.

Do you have any more information on the "necessary framework for launching whatever program you want upon any key press"? Does the actual key pressed get passed to the application that it launched?

Install the package keyboard-shortcuts. This package includes a python program /usr/bin/keyboard-shortcut, that runs for every key pressed while home screen, application launcher or windows switcher are displayed. Currently this program opens a browser window with google.com if the key 'o' is pressed. But it can be easily changed to run any program and to pass it the pressed key.

Wow that's a lot simpler than I thought
Thanks!

While not a solution for the desktop, see the last post on this page, which refers back to posts in the thread, for a way to get this search from address bar function in the N900 browser.