I have been looking for a while, a tools to search files and folders on Linux that is fast and low consumption in CPU like everything from Voidtools in MS Windows. If you wonder what is everything voidtools, you can read it here (you can use google translate for it, as It is written in Indonesian language). I have been using XFCE Desktop for long time across Linux distro. XFCE always ship catfish, as their de-facto tools for searching file using tracker miner (as I know, please correct me if I’m wrong). Even with tracker miner, catfish is so slow, and crawling, and even can’t stand against Thunar search itself (since version 4.18.4 Thunar has search inbuilt), which is frustrating. My nature when searching file always searching it’s name and extension, because my main search tool in windows in the past is everything Voidtools, is blazing fast, type and it’s constantly show the result for me in real time.
So in search of tools that help me have same experience on Linux distro, I found Fsearch. This tools mimics “everything”, but it works on every file system. Unlike everything that’s limited to fat, exfat, ntfs, and it’s derivative, Fsearch works on all file system, windows, Linux, or even macOS one. It’s approach is different from “everything”, rather than using $MSFT ntfs table, it scan directly to the folder, and show result fast enough like in “everything”, this make FSearch not tied to any file system. But this come with a downside, we need to periodically scan the location for change, if there are changes. Well, I can scan folder and file under 10s for 1 million files in my fedora XFCE, and it only took 3s for 270k files and folder on knock off Kingston SSD (I know I shouldn’t buy this, but at that time, the only things that’s affordable for my pocket is.. this SSD).
It’s been 1 year since I use it daily, and it’s so useful that I mapped it to alt+f1, so I can open it fast and open file by searching it. We install FSearch in any Linux desktop distro. For fedora, you can run this command
$ sudo dnf copr enable cboxdoerfer/fsearch
$ sudo dnf install fsearch
To do periodically scanning for the database update, you can add to crontab the command of fsearch to run in background.
$ crontab -e
# put this, then save the crontab
*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/fsearch -u
You can also hook a cli command to open with specific search term using this command
$ fsearch -s “search term”
It will open a new window, with the search term inputted. For other distro, you can see the readme (https://github.com/cboxdoerfer/fsearch#download) for further way of installation in your respective distro. Also if you feel that this tools also help you daily, you can donate to the project or adding like to the copr or github project. It will help the creator. This is the example of the view of the Fsearch on my fedora desktop when searching .txt file.
It also support excluding folder, files, and include specific location that’s not mounted directly to system, eg. network location. You can also use any short cut like in everything for some files that we want to find.
So basicly this is a replacement for everything voidtools on Linux. This post meant to only share FSearch as replacement for “everything”. If you have question regarding FSearch, you can fill it into the comment section. Thank you for visiting my post.
