Johannes Buchner

Desktop search engines, like beagle, metatracker, strigi, jindex, etc. provide a comfortable way of jumping to the files you want to work with. They do this by indexing all your files, making a database, and searching that database by your keywords.

Unfortunately, these databases are around a gigabyte in size for me (e.g. tracker, strigi). Context search is overkill for  me, because I name my files properly and put them in folders.

Introducing “Spuren”

So I developed a search engine a while ago that works on file names and paths: The keywords a file can be found is the filename and path split by ‘/’,'-’,'_’,’.’,'\’. With the feature of exclusive search terms (starting with ‘-’), and being able to open the found file or its parent folder, that is something you can work with.

Now this tool is available as a indexer and search tray icon program, for Unix only. It quickly produces a tiny database of your files, because it is based on unix tools (find+gzip). The search tool is written in Java.

Try out “spuren”, the content-free desktop search engine. Spuren is German for ‘tracks’. Download it at the bottom of this page.

Spuren provides a KISS combination of the ease of use of Beagle et. al. and the simplicity of find.

Install and Configure

• Download the tar and extract it somewhere, for example in ~/bin/
• Put the directories you want to have indexed in ~/.local/share/spuren/dirs (line by line)
• Put the directory names you want to have skipped in ~/.local/share/spuren/skipdirnames
• Put the file names you want to have skipped in ~/.local/share/spuren/skipfilenames
• Run spuren-mine. This produces ~/.local/share/spuren/db.gz, which contains all indexed file names.
• Run spuren-trayicon (and perhaps make yourself a icon on the desktop or put it into session start preferences).
• Click on the icon and search away

Tipps

• Separate keywords by spaces (search will be slightly faster if you enter the least generic term first)
• You can exclude by prefixing a ‘-’, for example ” houses -skyscrapers  “
• The default is to find files that have tags starting with the given keywords. You can prefix with a ‘*’ to find files that have tags containing the given keyword. For example: “houses *scrape”.
• You can jump down to the results by pressing the down key, and up gets you back. Escape closes the search window.
• A double-click launches the file, pressing shift at the same time will open the folder the file is in instead.
• You can rebuild the database by right-clicking the icon. It only takes a minute or two.
• The result folders are abbreviated to 3 chars to save space. You can find the full path and some other info at the bottom of the window

FAQ

• “Java is ugly”: You can switch to the GTK theme or Nimbus LAF. Enable it in the swing.properties file.

… leave feedback and comments …

Download

• Spuren, release 1.0: spuren-1.0.tar.bz2
• Source for Java program: spuren-1.0-source.tar.bz2