Searching Inside Documents with DocFetcher

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There are plenty of tools that you can use to find a specific file or document by its name on your local hard disk or remote share. But what if you need to find a document containing a word or text fragment? Enter DocFetcher, a graphical desktop search application that can search inside documents. It supports a wide range of popular document formats, including Microsoft Office, HTML, PDF, RTF, plain text, and OpenOffice.org. If you are running Ubuntu, you can install DocFetcher using its .deb package. For other Linux distributions, you can download an archived version of the application, unpack it, and launch DocFetcher using the DocFetcher.sh script.

Before you can put DocFetcher to use, you have to index the directory containing documents. To do this, right-click on the Search Scope pane and choose Create Index. Select the desired directory, and wait till DocFetcher finishes the indexing operation. You can then search through the indexed documents by specifying the search term you want in the Search field and pressing Enter. DocFetcher returns a list of matching documents sorted by relevance. Select the document you want, and you can see its content with highlighted occurrences of the search string in the Preview pane. Use the Next and Previous buttons to quickly jump to the previous or next occurrence of the search string. Besides simple searches, you can use a variety of supported parameters. For example, to include or exclude a search term you can use the plus (+) and minus (-) operators. You can also use wild cards and limit searches to specific file extensions.