On my custom right hand side tab which I use 90% of the time I have a slider which limits the number of tiddlers shown for my various custom filters ( show all tiddlers, show tiddlers ranked by xyz, by tag and so on ).
Incidentally I need to revisit the post from which I “quoted” the above image because it includes code for the originally badly optimised filters which I have only recently improved - although more still improvements required.
It’s convenient, on my android devices I rarely push the slider past 30, on my laptop perhaps a 100.
My ideal would be that the slider in the picture above controlled all searches as well as my filters and tag pills eg anything that can ‘fill’ the story river with tiddlers - often the approach I use to ‘fill’ the story river is based simply on a decision which method will get me to that cluster of tiddlers - the method is usually immaterial as long as it delivers the ‘working set’ of tiddlers I need - usually one tiddler being edited and perhaps another ten that I want to cross reference, cut and paste from and so on.
So for me it all boils down to the same thing - a chosen method to get to the cluster of tiddlers I want to see on the story river and then a wish to throttle back the number of tiddlers actually displayed in most cases after ranking (1) - for me the same slider would work equally well for pretty much all methods of populating the story river.
(1) For instance buttons marked ★↑ - rank tiddlers by ascending ( or descending ) star rating - unfortunately of course it is necessary to order all tiddlers by the selected ranking method before then applying the limit of only 30 or 100.