Baloo indexing works for me - the investment in background processing is well worth the accurate sub-100ms responses to my baloosearch queries over a few terabytes. Don't believe the naysayers, it is awesomely stable and functional !

That said, where am I supposed to query Baloo from ? Command line baloosearch works for me as a testing device, as a scripting command and as a fallback for lack of anything else, but I expected such powerful functionality to be pushed front and center in various GUI.

I thought I had understood that Baloo is a kfind backend, but Dolphin's "More Search Tools" doesn't feature it. Dolphin's default search seems to look only at file names and not even indexed ones. I'm puzzled.

So, please - where am I supposed to find access to that ursine power ?

Hi!

You can use milou as a search tool, or just krunner. I think Dolphin only uses baloo for content searching, but I do not really know.

Thanks for suggesting krunner - I didn't know it and now I love how it saves me quite a few ad hoc xterm launches.

Alas I can't use milou for now: my main panel is xfce's - long story, but I come from xfce long ago. I find myself using more and more KDE and I now default to KDE for new setups but this workstation has a lot of legacy, so milou alas isn't an option.

I think I have a Dolphin problem with Baloo... Let me open a thread for that !

You could try to use the Viewer. It is basically a development tool, but it could work

Code: Select all

plasmoidviewer --applet /usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.milou


Sweet, thanks - I was wondering how to do that !

That said, milou's baloo functionality seems to be exactly similar to krunner's - which is now part of my environment: perfect for a quick search but not the full-of-options and showing-all-results UI that I'm looking for.

I don't know if it exists, but it wouldn't be that hard to write, I think. There is the --type for audio, text, etc. The other options are to limit output, e.g.

Code: Select all

# limit to 5 results
baloosearch Iron Maiden --type audio -i -l 5
# get next 5 results
baloosearch Iron Maiden --type audio -i -l 5 -o 5
# …


The results could be then filtered again, or sorted. What do you expect this tool to do?

Baloo's latency impresses me - it is sufficiently quick to support the top-down iterative nature of search in an interaction responsive enough to prevent user frustration: start with a couple search terms, get way too many results, refine search terms and iterate until a satisfactory results set.

My opinion may not be useful for now, as I've not yet found how to use Baloo within Dolphin - so maybe that existing integration does all I want... From what I see (search terms field, type filter, date filter, results as Dolphin file list), it does !

So, I think I just have to sort out my Dolphin/Baloo integration problem - not start thinking about a new tool.

According to ArchWiki:Baloo it should work in Dolphin as default search. I cannot check, because I unfortunately cannot use baloo. I have some external mounts (sshfs/nfs) which trigger a full rescan on mount. Perhaps you are missing some optional packages in Dolphin like baloo-widgets or kio-extras or so.

But you are right: The query time is awesome. 15G database and searches in less then 100ms.

You can see whether Dolphin thinks it can ask Baloo by looking at the F5 search prompt

https://bugsfiles.kde.org/attachment.cgi?id=137169

If the prompt includes options to search for specific types, dates, ratings or tags, Dolphin believes Baloo has indexed that info and it can ask...

But also have a look at Bug 424871, there's a summary of when Dolphin queries Baloo halfway down.

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=424871#c4

There are traps and complications in cases with symlinks...