RetroArch - Explore View VS Playlist Search

Hi, Happy New Year to all.

odysee video

I use RetroArch through its standard GUI on my PC (and Steam Deck) without another frontend, and through the commandline interface (but that’s for another day). And today, I discovered a little behavior I was not aware of. It’s really just a tiny thing, but quite useful to know. In short, if I enter a search in a playlist and change the playlist while the search is still active, then the search will apply to the other playlist as well. Meaning I do not need to enter the search terms again, when switching playlist.

I also like the (relatively recently added) Views, which can be saved by searching in the Explore area. They are pretty cool. Now the problem is, that a regular Playlist search and the Explore view does not act the same. And there is a huge difference (at least to my knowledge): Explore searches can only find titles known to the database, while a regular search in a playlist can also find titles unknown to the database.

Now it is entirely possible that I miss an option and these can be tweaked. But for the fun sake I recorded and edited a little under 3 minute video to showcase what I mean. It’s not the most high quality video editing, but hope it can show, better than I can explain with words alone.

And BTW, the music are ocremix.org songs from Super Mario Kart.

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Yeah I also discovered by “accident” the playlist search option to keep the query while switching playlists, it’s quite handy!

Something useful to add to the explore search (that I rarely use) would be an option to search in all playlist so that all the result will show regardless of database entries. I think I wrote it in the suggestions thread few months ago.

Happy new year!

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