How to Find Full Text Files on Lightweight Linux Distros

As I suppose some of you know, KDE comes with Nepomuk, which among other things allows us to search files or programs very easily. Just start typing the name and they're out. Something similar happens in Unity or GNOME. By making some adjustments, some of them even allow you to search within the files (what in English is called "full text search"). Those who have ever used Windows 7 will also know what I'm talking about: just start typing a word to bring up related files or programs.

On lighter distributions this is a bit more difficult to achieve. But the method that I am going to teach you is VERY light (according to distros of this type) and effective.

Choose the launcher: dmenu

My first choice was to try launchers that don't depend on a particular environment or distro. I mean Synapse (which is now in fashion), Gnome-Do, Kupfer, etc. They all share one thing: they cannot perform "full text" searches (that is, within files). In addition, they come with a lot of other plugins that do not contribute much to me. Not to mention they are not "minimalist" and light enough.

Those who use Openbox, Enlightenment or similar probably know dmenu. Those who have never used it, I suggest you visit this old post where its main characteristics are explained. In short, it is an ultra-minimalist and super-light application launcher. But it is not only that, what I did not know is that if it is configured correctly, it can also be used to show elements of any list that we pass to it. This discovery opens the doors to many possibilities ...

To install dmenu in Arch, just open a terminal and run:

sudo pacman -S dmenu

Install Recoll

The second discovery was Recoll. Our friend Fico talked about him a few months ago, article whose reading I recommend.

Recoll is a very light tool, independent from any desktop environment, that allows you to search in full text ("full text"). Obviously, for that you will need to index the files first, which may take a while, but after the initial indexing is done, the rest of the updates don't take long.

Recoll is a graphical interface, easy to use and with many options, designed in QT and based on the search engine Xapian.

Are you still using locate, find or catfish? Ha! I kept reading ...

To install Recoll on Arch and derivatives:

yaourt -S recoll

You will notice that recoll has a bunch of packages as optional dependencies:

• libxslt: for XML based formats (fb2, etc)
• unzip: for the OpenOffice.org documents
• xpdf: for pdf
• pstotext: for postscript
• antiword: for msword
• catdoc: for ms excel and powerpoint
• unrtf: for RTF
• untex: for dvi support with dvips
• djvullibre: for djvu
• id3lib: for mp3 tags support with id3info
• python2: for using some filters
• mutagen: Audio metadata
• python2-pychm: CHM files
• perl-image-exiftool: EXIF ​​data from raw files
• aspell-en: English stemming support

Installing these packages will allow Recoll to index the contents of the corresponding file types. For example, antiword, allows Recoll to index the contents of .DOC files, etc.

The selection of additional components to install depends on your needs and the variety of file types that are stored on your computer. However, not to despair because Recoll, after indexing our files, will recommend which components to install to improve their effectiveness.

How to use Recoll

When you start Recoll for the first time, the screen shown below will appear. In case you want to index only your HOME (in full), just click on Start indexing now.

Recoll has powerful search facilities. In addition to entering the words to search, it also allows Boolean searches assisted with proximity clauses, filtering the types of files or location. It also allows Xesam compatible search, by field and filtering by date.

The response of the program when carrying out searches and presenting results is also surprising for its speed, and interesting for the way in which they present those results, determining the most relevant documents, for the search terms that are provided, and including a preview.

In the image below, I decided to show the results in a table, although Recoll comes by default with another style to show the results, much more complete and descriptive.

To see the missing packages so that Recoll can perform a full indexing of your files, just go to File> Show Missing Helpers.

En Preferences> Indexing Schedule You can configure the file indexing schedule. Obviously, for Recoll to work well it needs to index all your files (or at least the files in the folder that interests you, usually your HOME). For this, there are 3 alternatives: indexing by hand (my preferred one), indexing through cron or indexing at system boot.

Magic: combining Recoll and dmenu… is it possible?

Yes Yes it is. The trick is to know that dmenu not only allows you to list applications but also anything that we pass to it. You just have to figure out how to search Recoll using a terminal and pass the results to dmenu.

Magic is achieved, how could it be otherwise, through a simple script, whose authorship is Massimo Lauria and that I dared to modify slightly to translate it into Spanish.

Download script

Save the file (suppose, search-recoll.sh). Grant it execute permissions (sudo chmod + to fetch-recoll.sh) and assign it an appropriate key combination. In Openbox, this is achieved by editing the file ~ / .config / openbox / rc.xml or through the graphical interface obkey.

The bottom line: full-text searches using very few resources. As the Bambino Veira would say: "Beauty!"

yapa

Those using Ubuntu can get similar results through Recoll's Lens. To do this, it is necessary to add the corresponding PPA and install the following packages:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa: recoll-backports / recoll-1.15-on sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install recoll sudo apt-get install recoll-lens