While I’m not totally sold on the desktop search realm of applications due to their history of being monolithic resource destroyers, I decided to revisit this group of GUI alternatives to grep, find, and awk.

The app that seems to have improved the most in the past 18 months is clearly Recoll. It allows (well in this case, forces) the user to schedule the search index updates instead of them occurring automatically. While this does introduce an extra step in the setup process, it allows you to keep the resource-hungry indexing process from running during your peak usage hours. Most Windoze users should be use to this with their Antivirus program of choice running its weekly “omg-please-say-I-didn’t-get-slammed-with-another-batch-of-malware” scans, and have opted to have these ran during the early morning hours on a Sunday or something.

The beauty of a desktop search tool is to allow quick searches through gigs worth of files, including content, metadata, and context checking. While expertly crafted grep/find/awk commands can execute this request, they still must traverse your entire drive if you have no idea where to begin the search. A desktop search tool utilizes an index of said files that can be tailored to specific directories or file types if you wish. This results in faster search results within a context you care about (or at least told the app you care about).

Recoll is available via your package manager of choice, or for the most recent release check out their RPM page.