Enabling the MediaWiki InputBox to use the new MediaSearch instead of SpecialSearch on Commons (Community Wishlist/W387)

Description

On Commons, c:Template:Search inside category is a neat template that can be manually added to category pages to add a search box where users (even unexperienced ones) can search the category contents, including all its often many subcategories.

The problem is that there doesn't seem to be any way to make it use the MediaSearch – it only uses the antique outdated SpecialSearch which uses a list display instead of a modern UI with a wall of images.

Please enable using it with MediaSearch by making the extension compatible with MediaSearch (this probably needs a parameter for whether or not MediaSearch is to be used and some parameter(s) for the tab that should be opened which is "Images" by default).

Two examples where I think the search box searching all subcategories is useful: c:Category:Our World in Data and c:Category:Videos by Terra X. Potentially if deepcategory-support is improved a category search box could even be shown in all Commons categories.

Better than these approaches would be if the Wikimedia search engine could show a dropdown whether to search all Wikimedia Commons or only the current category. The default would be to search all of WMC so the search experience for somebody looking to search all of Commons would stay the same but when looking to search only the category one would only need to select the second dropdown after entering some search terms into the box. This is like on GitHub where when entering something into the search bar when on some repository page (like this page) it shows the dropdown options "Search in this repository" or "Search all of GitHub".

Assigned focus area

Improved discovery of media files

Type of wish

Feature request