Meta Tracker: Desktop Search Tool
Despite what I wrote my [previous post on tracker][1], it turns out that there is a desktop search utility that connects to tracker. I stumbled upon it by accident today when I was looking for something else in my menu. It's found in Applications -> Accessories -> Tracker Search Tool.
The application is pretty basic at this point – searches can be run and the results are displayed in a list which includes the name of the file, an icon as would be found in Nautilus and a text snippet which contains the relevant search terms (displayed in bold). You can limit search to general categories of files, which are
Development, Documents, Images, Music, Plain Text and Videos. I think "Music" should be changed to "Audio" to make it more general. Searches can also be saved to a text file, which will be filled with a list of the file paths of the matches.
Here are some improvements I hope will be made for the next version (which will be included by default in Ubuntu 7.10):
- "search as you type" functionality, as displayed in Beagle
- a simple key trigger to bring up the search
- fix a bug with the results layout being stretched too wide by long file names, which in turn squashes the snippet against the side of the list and forces the list rows to be pushed too high!
- resize results layout when the window is resized
Now that Ubuntu has chosen tracker as their primary search tool I hope to see some even greater improvements to the software. Already it is the search daemon with the smallest footprint (with the possible exception of locate) and the search results seem to be pretty good. I'm sure that these things can even be improved with enough resources dedicated to development.
[1]: http://www.chnorton.com.au/2007/07/09/meta-tracker-initial-thoughts/