Find files and directories with FSearch

Quick Finder

Article from Issue 270/2023
Author(s):

In a crowded field of search applications, FSearch offers many interesting functions for quickly searching files and folders, with more promised in the future.

Data has the bad habit of hiding away in the depths of the filesystem precisely when you need it urgently. That's why there are tools at different levels to help with searching, including FSearch v0.2.2. Similar to the Findutils for locate, FSearch first builds a database of the selected data, which can then be searched at lightning speed. The search begins as soon as you start entering the search term.

Great Selection

It is important to distinguish between desktop environment search tools and generic search tools. In terms of user interfaces, KDE Plasma offers the KRunner, KFind, and Baloo programs, the latter being the underpinnings for searching with the Dolphin file manager. Gnome comes with Tracker integrated into the Nautilus file manager by default. In addition, there are many search apps that do not depend on a desktop and can be set up retroactively. The best-known candidates here include Catfish, ANGRYsearch, Recoll, and FSearch. At the command line, there are the tried-and-trusted find and locate tools, and others.

This article covers the open source FSearch tool, whose search speed is hard to beat and which comes with some interesting features. German developer Christian Boxdörfer was inspired to create FSearch [1] by the speed of the Everything search engine [2] on Windows. First released in 2016, the C program is based on the GTK3 toolkit. The developer is already planning a conversion to the Qt framework, but the app already integrates quite well with Qt-based systems.

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