It's somewhat similar to 'recoll' in its functionality, only with recoll you need to index everything before search. It even uses the same approach of using third-party software like poppler for extracting the contents.
By the way Recoll also has a utility named rclgrep which is an index-less search. It does everything that Recoll can do which can reasonably done without an index (e.g.: no proximity search, no stem expansion etc.). It will search all file types supported by Recoll, including embedded documents (email attachments, archive members, etc.). It is not built or distributed by default, because I think that building an index is a better approach, but it's in the source tar distribution and can be built with -Drclgrep=true. Disclosure: I am the Recoll developper.
Wow this is a gem of a comment. I use Recoll heavily, it's a real super power for an academic, but I had no idea about rclgrep. Thank you for all your work.
I think an index of all documents (including the contained text etc) should be a standardized component / API of every modern OS. Windows has had one since Vista (no idea about the API though), Spotlight has been a part of OS X for two decades, and there are various solutions for Linux & friends; however as far as I can tell there's no cross-platform wrapper that would make any or all of these easy to integrate with e.g. your IDE. That would be cool to have.
medoc|1 year ago
nanna|1 year ago
rollcat|1 year ago