NEI is now capable of performing searches asynchronously, but the user is still forced to wait for the search to complete before seeing any results. In my opinion, it would be more convenient if items appeared in the panel as soon as they pass the filter. There is no guarantee that the item you are looking for wouldn't be the last one, but it provides a better user experience than not seeing the side panel update at all.

I'll probably look into this after #250 if there is interest.

I started playing with this on a local branch but found it to have a pretty major flaw: currently the matching items are sorted by name (to put it simply). This means that as more items are found, the result you were actually looking for may jump around in the list.

One solution to this problem would be to sort the items based on how closely they match the given search instead.

The performance improvements in #254 make this unneeded.