Hello,

Dolphin has an integrated search tool.

As I want to use Dolphin together with this integrated search tool in Xfce, I am interested in the following question:

When does Dolphin update its index?
A) Manually by the user?
B) Once every hour?
C) Once, when the system is booted new?
D) Automatically whenever the name of a file has changed or when a new file was added?
E) Other.

Would appreciate some answer. Thank you.

Dolphin uses what the system provides, and in Plasma this is Baloo. You can of course use this on other desktops but you will have to start it as it will not run automatically just by using Dolphin.
Moving this to Desktop Search...

Thank you @Mamarok.
In this case my question is:

When does -- BALOO -- update its index?
A) Manually by the user?
B) Once every hour?
C) Once, when the system is booted new?
D) Automatically whenever the name of a file has changed or when a new file was added?
E) Other.

Theoretically option D if you enable file indexing and file path is included.

You can also index or delete files manually using command "balooctl" index and "balooctl clear".

You can find also more information about Baloo in our wiki: https://community.kde.org/Baloo/Configuration

Thank you all.

I have not activated baloo until now, and of course as expected I have no index in ~/.local/share/baloo .

-> So I would expect, that searching would not work.
But searching nevertheless works. A little slow, but it works. Why?

I guess that is due to the basic file indexing in Linux, I suppose every distribution does have some running tool, be this locate (and updatedb) or similar.

As said before: Dolphin just uses what is running underneath, Baloo is just one of many different file indexing possibilities in the user space, with some configuration and tweaking options other tools don't provide.

Thank you.

This is a question for "content searching":
Where can I find a list with ALL docments that baloo does support for indexing for content search?

I am looking for a list like:
-LibreOffice *.odt
-Micrsosoft Word *.doc
-Microsoft Visio *.vsd
-Microsoft Visio *.vsdx
-PDF
...

If that list exists I don't know where it can be located.

Here are the current available extractors and with the file name is easy to guess what it do:
https://github.com/KDE/kfilemetadata/tree/master/src/extractors

Not sure if I miss anything.

But as far as I can see,
https://github.com/KDE/kfilemetadata/tr ... extractors
is only to extract meta-data text.

Quote:
"This library is typically used by file indexers to retreive the metadata. "
https://github.com/KDE/kfilemetadata

Such things like tags in documents, music title/album from mp3, meta information in photos and so on and not to index the content of documents. Do I miss anything?

My 2 cents:
1. "When does Dolphin update its index?"
- Whenever the index file in ~/.local/share/baloo is deleted Baloo rebuilds the index from scratch. You can do this directly or via the command

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balooctl purge

. In general, I recommend using the CLI to manage Baloo. If only the file names are indexed, indexing of about 750.000 files on a NAS takes less than an hour, however, it takes almost a day if also the file content is indexed. The size of the index is then many GBs.
- If the inotify watch limit is sufficient high, baloo monitors all indexed folders and updates automatically any change almost immediately. In case that another host makes changes e.g. on a NAS, run

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balooctl check

and Baloo searches for the unindexed files.
2. "I have not activated Baloo ... but searching nevertheless works. Why?"
I assume that KFind or some other search tool is running instead. It may not use an index, which is why the search takes its time. In Dolphin you may switch between various installed search tools (e.g. Baloo, KFind, FSearch, AngrySearch, Recoll, etc.).
3. "Where can I find a list with ALL docments that baloo does support for indexing for content search?"
Well, I don't know of such a list, but

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balooctl config ls excludeFilters

&&

balooctl config ls excludeMimetypes

provide a list of the excluded filters and mimetypes. This can be changed using the parameters "add" and "remove". The converse argument would say, that whatever is not excluded is included for indexing. You must not forget to run

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balooctl config set contentIndexing yes

.

Edited by moderator for better readability