 One of the things on Linux that just kind of sucks is search And I know when I say that that a lot of people are actually going to disagree because there are a lot of tools on Linux to search like there's a lot of launchers to search. There's a lot of GUI tools There's a lot of terminal tools and when I say search sucks I'm not saying that it's necessarily That there's no tools out there that are good because that's not true I mean locate and find and all these terminal applications that are used to search through your file system They're all good to varying degrees on depending on what use case you're using them for Same thing with several different GUI tools. They're all good to varying degrees The problem is is that they all there's no one like unifying Search tool that is almost guaranteed to find what you're looking for sometimes locate works Sometimes locate doesn't work sometimes find works sometimes find doesn't work sometimes you use like where is and Where is will work sometimes where is doesn't work Sometimes you use your app launcher or something you search for an app and it works sometimes it doesn't work I think you get the point and Honestly, that's what I mean when I say search on Linux is kind of terrible because it's kind of fragmented And you have to go through and use a specific tool when you're looking for a certain thing And you have to use a different tool when you're looking for something else. There's nothing that kind of brings it all together so I've been on the lookout for an application that does search better and Today I'm going to be showing in an app called fsearch. I'm not convinced that this application is any better than any of the rest I haven't used it for a long time just a few days and it seems good But it it's kind of like all the others that it does certain things Really well and it does other things and not so well, so let's go ahead and jump in we're gonna take a look at fsearch today So this is what fsearch looks like out of the box. I've done no customization to it There's not much you can customize about the look and feel of it. You can choose between a light and a dark theme That's pretty much it. It's a GTK based application and it's available pretty much in every repo that I've tried it in I believe it's in Debbie and in a boot to and it was for sure in the a you are so if you want to download this It's fairly easy and I'm pretty sure that there's snaps and flat packs But don't quote me on that the point is it's easy to install and it was easy to launch It was very fast and that's one of the things that I really like about it Like if I search for something here, let's just say I search for wallpaper You can see as I type the stuff comes up. It's like instantaneously fast and it's that is so cool, right? Usually when yes, like if I open up a terminal here if I do a locate for the same word wallpaper It does come up pretty fast But I also have to scroll all the way up and some some terminals don't have scrolling capabilities Sometimes you have so many search results It kind of overpowers your terminal and you can't scroll back that far because you don't have your history set that long You know, it has all sorts of problems, right? So the great thing about fsearch is that there's no limit on that and you scroll down and so it's a little bit easier that way plus What I like about it is that it does full this first So it search for searches for directories first It would all it will also allow you to do. Let's just say I know I have where I have most of my wallpaper so I could do walls slash other walls and it'll actually show me there and it will actually go through and limit the search to that specific path So everything that shows below this are going to be in this directory here And that's kind of neat, right? It's kind of it's smart enough to know that you're searching for a path You can turn that off and I'll show you the settings here in a minute But the best part about this is still the speed because when you first launch this If we quit this and relaunch it every time you launch The application it indexes your file system and you'd expect then for the application to be like really super slow But it's not if I open this up. It opens up. It's like instantaneous I don't know how it does it. What kind of magic it's using to index the entire home directory that quickly But it does and we know that it actually does in indexes because if we go here to the preferences If I can click on things clicking is hard It'll actually says it updates database on start. You can also have it set at crowns I have to go through and Index every you know 15 minutes or 15 hours or whatever you want. You can go through and include Certain directories that you wanted to search. So this is not searching the whole Your whole hard drive by any means is by default It just indexes your home directory For your user not all users just your users if there are certain things that you don't want it to search You can go through and exclude those directories by entering them here For example, if you wanted to have it exclude all of your git directories You could put that in here for the most part There's not a ton of settings here, but it will allow you to go through and set single click to open It would allow you to show the icons in the name of the column It will allow you to show tooltips and highlighted search items So there are a few things, but there's not a ton of stuff here that you can you know tweak and stuff to do this The thing about it is I feel that it's best for searching just One directory or one home directory and specifically it's best at searching for Personal files I've been using it mostly to search for wallpapers that I know Vaguely what you know the names are of I've also been using it to search for certain Dot files, so if I search for xmonad For example, I see all the places I have my xmonad file. So I've downloaded xmonad Config files from a couple different people But I also have mine here if I were to go through and use this more often I would probably have it exclude the things that I've downloaded from github because usually when I'm searching for something I'm not mine Not other people's right another great thing is that if you're searching for a specific file type So let's just say again We want to search for wallpapers and we can go over here to this drop down and search for just pictures So this way it will show us just pictures if we wanted to search for Let's just say All scripts if I just search for dot sh it'll actually go through and show me the things that have dot sh It's not so great with file extensions because as you can see it actually showed me a couple audio files here But for the most part we're seeing Just the extensions of dot sh One thing it doesn't seem to let you do is search just by extension So like you can see up here at the top all the stuff you can search and filter by archives audio documents pictures and videos It would be nice if I could go through and just say hey, uh, this is the extension I want to search for because some files aren't Pictures or audio and stuff. They're scripts or they're they're open document files or whatever, you know And I want to search for those. There's not real ways. I mean I could go through and do documents, but that's just going to be Hit or miss because sometimes it might not have the right extension or it might not qualify as a document for whatever Criteria they're going through and using in this case It looks like it's if you type in something and you're looking just for documents It's looking for things like txt files and uh, like excel spreadsheets apparently But it it doesn't actually show any odt file So I know I have a ton of odt files that would technically be documents, but they're not showing up here So it does have its limitations and that's what I was talking about At the beginning where I'm not quite sure that this was fulfilling my need of having a one-stop shops for search Because despite the fact that it is so fast It's not necessarily something that I would be able to use to search for things very specifically Because it doesn't have like an advanced search That's one thing that I was kind of missing about it Is that when you go to like a website or a database website or something Yeah, a lot of times they have this the regular search bar But they also have like an advanced search form where you can go through and narrow things down by Different criteria, whether it's you know category or you know, whatever it doesn't really matter There's usually a ton of different options for you to go through and fill out and to try to narrow down what you're searching for And when I first downloaded fsearch I was really hoping for something like that because there's not anything really like that that I've tried so far on linux Especially with like command line tools when you want to do some searching You either have to just use locate or find or you have to use like regex in order to Search for things, you know that way and I'm horrible with regex So I just wanted something simple and fsearch is definitely simple, but it's a little bit too simple So that's my first look at fsearch. I've been using it for a few days So I guess I really can't call it a first look, but whatever it's good I think I will have it I'll keep it installed and see if it gets updated to have some more features and stuff like that and I didn't one thing I didn't cover was that it does allow you to search through with regex If that's something that you're familiar with you can go through and do things like that I wasn't even going to attempt to do that on camera because I would just embarrass myself So that is it for this video if you have used fsearch or you have other recommendations for really cool search tools You can leave those in the comment section below. Make sure you like comment and subscribe all that stuff I really do appreciate everybody who hits that red button I'm trying to aim for like 7,000 subscribers by the end of the year. That'd be awesome I remember like Just a few months ago When I was saying, hey, wouldn't it be really cool if I got to a thousand subscribers by the end of the year? I'm pretty sure I said that in many different videos When I right when I first started like at the beginning of the year like january and february I was kept saying well, you know, I really want to get to a thousand subscribers by the end of the year Look at us now. Wow. Anyways, thanks everybody who has subscribed If you want to follow me on twitter, you can do so at the linux cast You can subscribe to me on mastodon and discord and all that stuff all those links will be in the video description below You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linux cast before I go I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons devon chris east coast web gen 2 is fun too petrico primus marcus Makelyn jackson of tools divay city mitral arts center amityas merit camp joshily j dogs the bsd's rock and peter a Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time