Baloo in 18.04

[chimak111]

Looks like full-text indexing maybe off by default in 18.04 leaving users the option to enable it: https://phabricator.kde.org/T8256

[TWPonKubuntu]

Good. Indexing was a s l o w process and I spent more time researching how to turn if off than it would have taken to wait out the initial index process. I don't do much (none?) searching on my HD content, so Baloo was not a useful tool for me. Yeah, there are other uses for that index... but I'd rather not waste the disk space or my time.

[GreyGeek]

Good. Indexing was a s l o w process and I spent more time researching how to turn if off than it would have taken to wait out the initial index process. I don't do much (none?) searching on my HD content, so Baloo was not a useful tool for me. Yeah, there are other uses for that index... but I'd rather not waste the disk space or my time.

I second that. Indexing is also painfully slow in Muon as well. It must use the bubble sort. And, it rebuilds the index entirely too often. As slow as it is, once is enough, when starting up. Then it shouldn't be necessary unless one adds or removes source archives. Redoing the index almost every time one changes search terms is nonsense.

[acheron]

Good to hear some approval.

Regards Muon, recent changes in libqapt 3.0.4 and Muon 5.8 should reduce the amount of activity from apt-xapian-index.

[chimak111]

I was using Baloo with file content indexing active until now. Although I did run into high CPU usage, folks here helped work that out (https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showth...loo-going-wild).

I'll look at ack-grep now (despite the mention of "developers" in the title): https://www.digitalocean.com/communi...n-ubuntu-14-04

[GreyGeek]

I still use "locate" to find stuff on my HD. I update it every so often, or before I do some serious searching by using "sudo updatedb". It's REALLY FAST!

[chimak111]

Doesn't locate find files but not strings within files?

[Rod J]

Doesn't locate find files but not strings within files?

Yes, that's right.

File indexing is one of the first things I turn off in a new install, so I'll be glad if it's not turned on by default in K18.04. I've never used it in K14.04 at all. I think I had it working for a while in K12.04 but it kept crashing at that time. I had a huge text reference index file that it kept choking on I think. To be fair it was probably pre-Baloo (nepomuk I think).

I can find text within files using Krusader's search function and it doesn't take that long to do this on my data ... YMMV.

[chimak111]

...
I can find text within files using Krusader's search function and it doesn't take that long to do this on my data ... YMMV.

Do you also have LibreOffice files to deal with? Does Krusader manage to search within those? I use a script that relies on grep for that:

#!/bin/bash

find . -type f -name "*.od*" | while read i ; do
 [ "$1" ] || { echo "You forgot search string!" ; exit 1 ; }
 unzip -ca "$i" 2>/dev/null | grep -iq "$*"
 if [ $? -eq 0 ] ; then
    echo "string found in $i" | nl
 fi
done

from https://askubuntu.com/questions/9388.../938914#938914

Re. baloo gagging on certain files, I've been using a blacklist to exclude certain folders from baloo's purview. I haven't tried excluding specific files. I don't know if that's possible.

[Rod J]

Do you also have LibreOffice files to deal with? Does Krusader manage to search within those?

Unfortunately it doesn't look like Krusader can find text within .odt files. The Krusader search function has an option to search in text files but I don't think it includes LibreOffice files. I tried it both ways and even specifying .odt files exclusively it didn't find matching text in my simple text search.

I'll must try out that little bash script you posted, it looks like it could be useful.

[chimak111]

I never got deeply into what baloo could do in terms of looking into .odt, .ods, and even pdf files. I'll enable file indexing again to see

[chimak111]

Baloo can find text within .odt, .ods, and .pdf files rather quickly! And I'll leave it on.

In case anyone is interested, the contents of my baloofilerc are here and these are the exclusions I have: