Search as you type file searching
 

Coming from the Mac side, I had an amazing way to search for files quickly. It's called Spotlight. All I do is press the apple-space at and in the upper right hand corner is a place where I can type my search criteria. As I type the results are displaying and they are also categorized. Searching is a breeze. The Mac indexes all of the devices I have attached to my computer.

So far using Linux I have yet to find anything that comes close to this. There is always Catfish but I find it a pain to use and it looks rather dated.

Is there anything out there with similar funtionality to Spotlight that I can use. The terminal is not an option. I can't see my mom going to the terminal to search for files using complex syntax.

using KDE, alt+F2 opens up krunner (magic line as I like to call it) which supports what you want. Also pressing CTRL+F inDolphin (the kde file manager) puts it into search mode and that works pretty well too.

Serafean

I gather you use kde as your main distro?

What in your opinion is the best kde based distro at the moment?

I really like simple distros like puppy and crunchbang. Am I missing something when it comes to kde? I always felt there was too much eye candy for my liking. Maybe I should download a distro with the latest kde?

Looking forward to what you have to say regarding kde.

Hi,

i use Chakra and Gentoo as my main distros. Gentoo for my main desktop system, Chakra on my laptop. Gentoo is what you make it, Chakra is focused on KDE, and I find it to be one of the best KDE distributions that exist.
Neither of these is "simple" as in "click and work". Gentoo is very much hands-on, and Chakra pretty much works, until there is an update that requires user intervention.
As for KDE itself, I find it to be the DE that fits my mentality the best : very configurable, pretty and very well thought out. I don't know how to describe it, it's just that I made KDE fit the most the way I work.

For you Kubuntu might be an option.

Serafean

Thanks for your comments.

Hello,

I have been googling around for something like Spotlight too (that's how I ended up here). That is certainly one of the best features from Mac OSX.

I'm actually very new to Linux, I'm just using Linux Mint 15 Cinammon for less than two months now.

The search function in the Linux Mint menu (which you can access by pressing "Windows button") also search as you type, as fast as Spotlight, but unfortunatelly only for applications included in the menu. You cannot search any document with it. It's pretty handy to find apps you need, at least that's what I experienced. For example, I need to type a document, but I don't know the app's name (considering I'm very new to Linux), I just search for "text", and the search result come with two apps, "gedit" and "LibreOffice Writer". "gedit" is something like notepad in Windows, and "LibreOffice Writer" is like Microsoft Word. That is something Spotlight does, isn't it? ;)

Anyway, You can try installing "Recoll" to search for documents and its content. It's not as good to Mac OSX Spotlight, not even close, but I think that is the best option for now.

Btw, please let me know if you find something better than "Recoll".


Regards,

I will let you know for sure. I'm just surprised that there is nothing out there that comes close to Spotlight on the Mac. It's so easy and so fast to use. Wish there was something like it in the Linux world. All we have are Recoll, Catfish, Gnome-Do and similar search utilities.

See if any of these hit the spot(light!):
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1891394
http://www.noobslab.com/2013/06/indi...ve-of-mac.html (may be what you are after)
https://projects.gnome.org/deskbar-applet/index.html

Have you tried Synapse? Closest I've seen to Spotlight.

Thank you JWJones and XavierP, I'll take a look and report back about it!

Regards,

Yes I have tried Synapse but I wasn't sure if it was still being developed.