Hi,

I'm looking for a good desktop search application that's running nicely on the Xfce desktop. My clients use desktop search very often, so it's a vital function.

I've had some problems with recent versions of Catfish, so I'm looking for an alternative. Here's what I found so far:

• Searchmonkey
• Tracker
• Recoll

I'm looking for an application that's able to hunt down a search term in a forest of office documents, years of mail archives, keywords in image metadata, etc. The interface has to be available in english, french and german.

Recoll looks promising, but before I give it a spin, I'm curious about your eventual experiences and feedback.

Cheers,

Niki

Just waiting for someone to point that they "should just use the find command". Anyways, I am waiting for an answer because that is something I never found a good alternative.

1 members found this post helpful.

I just experimented a little bit with Recoll, which seems quite powerful. Now I just have to find a way to renice the indexation daemon under the hood.

Recently i use 'catfish (1.2.2)'

in my opinion this little prog's is very good - i use this from time to time when i need it

Unfortunately Catfish doesn't seem to like me.

http://lists.slackbuilds.org/piperma...il/013986.html

I've used recoll in the past, it's reliable, simple to use and able to search text in most types of files. I'd recommend it. The other two I'm afraid I don't know.

1 members found this post helpful.

helm, but that's on another OS.

Druthers of mine is locate. Is there a gui for that? I know that Krusader is a part of KDE and uses locate.

http://slackware.org.uk/slacky/slack...r/2.4.0.beta3/

http://distrowatch.com/images/screenshots/krusader.png

But I do not know of a single application that uses locate for indexing and searching files.

But to search for alternatives for Catfish. I would look through

http://alternativeto.net/software/catfish/

Edit: OOPs. My Bad. I see Tracker as the only viable choice in my above link and you already mentioned that.
So maybe

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...search_engines

may be a better contribution?

Installed recoil because of this thread. I set indexing in preferences for when I log in. I did not use the cron job option.

http://i.imgur.com/xrUmVNo.jpg

Its fast. I give it that.

is catfish meanwhile so usable like kfind was decades ago? ;-)

there is some difference betweens some search tools
some create an index, some not, some can search several document types and meta data of pictures, some can only search in text files.
so what requirement do you have?

there is also the desktop search from KDE, possible it is usable from within XFCE?

@kiki

EDIT

everything work really nice now
Catfish
Tracker
and Recoll

cheers!

I just tried recoll and it just f@cked up my system. When it found my *.gz-files which are several GB large it tried to invoke gzip and unzip them in /tmp directory? Of course, doing that resulted in error messages "Device full" e.t.c. I had to kill daemon and gzip and then remove files created in /tmp to recover my space back.

Nah, this never happened with Catfish which works pretty well for me.

1 members found this post helpful.

Try launching catfish from a terminal to see why it doesn't like you?

This thread is nine months old. In the meantime, I've settled for Recoll, which does an excellent job. I've also installed it to nearly all my clients, in replacement of Catfish (which is basically a useless toy compared to Recoll).

Recoll manages to search through gigabytes of documents (including MS Word documents), mails, metadata in image files, etc. in the blink of an eye, and it does an excellent job. The only thing you have to be careful with: on low-spec hardware, make sure to define a cronjob and set it to a time of the day where you don't use the computer too much. (Re)building the search index is a quite resource-hungry operation.

Cheers,

Niki

1 members found this post helpful.

Apologies Niki about the old thread and thank you for the Recoll information. I've run into problems with Catfish (usually after system upgrades) having to fix "inherits" in /usr/share/icons/<default>/index.theme file and regenerate the icon-theme.cache. However I like the sound of the speed of Recoll and will check it out. Again, thanks!