Hello!

This has been troublesome for over two years now. I usually use my file browser to search for files.
Now I get that KDE now has two ways of searching - searching for strings (file names) and semantic search.

Sadly none of the above seems to work correctly within dolphin. This is dolphin 5.12 on plasma 5.5 (Arch fully upgraded).

When trying to search my home directory for any content of files like "Dear Mr. Doe" I never get any results though in system settings baloo search is enabled.

When trying to search for "file name" I get some complete nonsensical results, most of the time nothing but when searching for "pdf" for example I get many results - but I have no way of knowing whether it's all of them...

Searching within emails doesn't work reliably also.

My questions are:

1. How is the whole searching system layed out and how to know whether it's working as intended or not?

2. Where is any up to date documentation for the different layers of the KDE search system: the akonadi system, the baloo system and the plasma search system, the recent documents system and so forth... ?

3. How can I fix the simple file name search in dolphin? - I create a file "example.abc" on my desktop and then search for it without any result- what's going on here?

4. If I have to completely reset all these search systems - is there an up to date (!) howto somewhere?

5. Is there a way to verify the sanity of the search systems (search has to work flawless otherwise you can't rely on it)?

Thx for reading, piedro

I was hoping to get at least some hints here, - seems to me that the ability to searching for files is a central part of any modern desktop experience...

No one?

p.

running

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balooctl status

shows files are indexed?

if the files are not indexed could it be baloo is not properly installed/configured? does it work for a new user?


to reset (I think), you will loose any changes manually set in the config file

1)

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balooctl stop

2) remove ~/.config/baloo* (3 files)
3) remove folder ~/.local/share/baloo
4)

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 balooctl start

5) after a while check the status to make sure files have been indexed

Do you perform the filename search "from here" or "everywhere"? The latter could take ages.
(If you've mlocate: there's kio-locate, but it needs porting to KF5 - shouldn't be too hard, though)

Baloo

The Baloo has KDE Community Wiki pages
- https://community.kde.org/Baloo
- debugging: https://community.kde.org/Baloo/Debugging

More tools

KFind - Find Files/Folders: https://www.kde.org/applications/utilities/kfind/
Catfish: http://www.twotoasts.de/index.php/catfish/

Under review - DolphinSearchBox: Add a "More search tools..." menu button - https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/123883/

Seems to work...

Hi!

Now that is a lot of suggestions - thank you very much!

@Google1103:
After cleaning up the baloo index as you suggested (and having an idea now to check it's sanity)
my searches within Dolphin work as expected and it's really fast. Very happy... - thx a lot!

The same is true for the quick search in Kmail - searching a single folder for any content on the fly works like a charm and is very fast also... such great news!

@luebking:
I am very glad to tell you that after some fiddling with excluding folders from baloo (here is still room to improve I guess...) the search "everywhere" works about as quickly as "from here"... and this is within a home folder with around a 1.3TB of project data!

@Rog131:
Thx for the links. Though these are not very helpful from a user perspective... I checked them before - couldn't find the vital info on "balooctl" (see above) for example...

I tried catfish - this does not work so well for me - I couldn't find anything when searching for content.
Also after refreshing the locatedb. An I am not convinced I want to have the whole tracked/Zeitgeist machinery running on top of baloo and akonadi...

Kfind seems to be very thorough though - if this will be available through the DolphinSearchBox - that's really convenient!

I really like an integrated solution within Dolphin - hope very much the "more search tools" get's available soon (well, after review and tests of course...)... Do you know what's the plan with this? Will it be integrated in Dolphin or is this a plugin to be found and installed?

Sadly, as well as the searching seems to work within Dolphin - the same cannot be said for the Kontact search functionality (buggy as..., well...) but that is probably an unrelated issue.

Thanks everyone for your help, this solved many of my search problems for now.
(and gives hope for the future of dolphin searching...)

Cheers,
p.