While working on a side-project to better navigate and search through my record collection, I found myself in need of a rich search input: one that accepts free-form text alongside structured filters like artist:“Aphex Twin” or label:“Warp Records” — You know, like the one you see on GitHub when searching/filtering issues. When I quickly realized a standalone custom element for this didn’t exist yet, I nerd sniped myself into building curating one.
We tried something like this at work, but users get confused compared to a more traditional tokenized filter UI, where filters are delineated better and each filter has an
xnext to it to remove just that filter. People aren’t used to having multiple filters in one search field, unless it’s just doing fulltext search across everything.I know Github does this, but Github users are a small subset of the population.