Simple, user-friendly GUI file finder?

Question

• simple, user-friendly = as Google search web page, one editbox, one button, nothing to explain, everybody grasps an idea in 1ms
• fast = finding files and directories by filenames, not by content (!)
• cute = it should be usable by weekend-users, so icons for files found, won't hurt

The closest project I found is Beagle (*), but it is dead now (it was canceled in 2009). It is said, Tracker is replacement of Beagle, but when I tried the GUI frontend... in short, disaster.

(*) but I am not sure if disabling in-file searching is possible.

I tried also Recoll, it is full-search program, the GUI has too many widgets, far for simplicity.

I can write such program on my own (Ligthppd+php script, that's all) but before I start, maybe you know about such tool ready to use?

Thank you in advance.

Solution 1

Catfish is a frontend for locate, among others. I think it satisfies all of your requirements, except for the ultra-simple part.

Solution 2

Why not use gnome-search-tool, the old GNOME GUI search? It works pretty well, and you can select between full-text search and filename search.

It has a whole bunch of filtering options (more than anything I've seen yet). Here's all the options:

Note that it doesn't use an index, so full-text search is ridiculous slow, but the filtering helps eliminate that. It's also primitive in that it finds only text, so there won't be for example contents for PDFs, OOo docs, metadata (e.g. music genre, document author, video framerate), etc.

Solution 3

I am going to attempt to create a list of GUI software for searching files.

gnome-search-tool

This was not installed by default in Linux Mint.

sudo apt-get install gnome-search-tool

Catfish

sudo apt-get install catfish

Solution 4

I think Gnome Do may be exactly what you want.

One potential problem (a show-stopper in my case) is that the index is limited to 5000 files. If you need to index more than that, Launchy is very similar, but less stable.

View more solutions

Comments

[tshepang]

When you said simple, I was about to mention Tracker, but since you knock it, I am going to have to ask what's missing in it?

[asr]

Did you try the command line tool locate? The only downside is having to run updatedb quite often to keep it up to date. But that can be worked around using cron.

[greenoldman]

@yasouser, you are not serious that weekend user will run locate.

[greenoldman]

@Tshepang, when I run myself Tracker I was a bit lost, because UI is so obscure (no text under icons, no options for that, icons misaligned, and so on), it would be fine (maybe) for weekend-user. However I didn't manage to run any query, because no matter what I enter I got 0 hits. There is no way to configure it ("options" shows statistics, not options), so I gave up.

[tshepang]

@macias: am curious which version you used?

[greenoldman]

@Tshepang 0.9.38, the latest available in openSUSE repos.

[tshepang]

Not good, one because that's an outdated version (the stable 0.10 has been out at least for a month), and because the latest search tool (tracker-needle) was slow as hell last I checked (2 weeks ago?) and has been so for quite a while, with not much seeming interest to fix it by the devs (they are focused on the engine and the data miners). I'm now using the ole 0.8 (in Debian 6) and the front-end works pretty well.

[user unknown]

Why not let a weekend user use locate? The name is easy to grasp, easy to remember, easily combined with ohter commands through pipes and command substitution. Better you teach the people to use a fancy search-box, which is useless for real work? Teach them locate -i and you needn't teach them -i at dozen other places. Teach them command substitution, and dito. Teach them pipes: dito. Or teach them how to cut and paste icons from box to box.

[greenoldman]

On answers like that I wish for huge repository or finally uniform package format, as openSUSE user I can say repo here is tiny. Thank you for the answer, I will wait a bit for other suggestions.

[greenoldman]

I don't see any resemblance with Google UI (one editbox, one button). It is not for weekend-users, weekend users "search", they don't build queries.

[tshepang]

You mentioned that you want the ability to just search file names, so I wonder how the one-button setup will work for that. Also, are you saying that the first UI (searches only filenames) is too complex for weekend user?