On-the-fly file search in gnome 3?

Question

I recently switched to Gnome 3 (on Onereic 11.10). I was a big fan of gnome-do (on Gnome 2), where I heavily used the "files and folders"-plugin. This allows to configure a list of files and folder to be searched on-the-fly while typing. E.g. starting to type "timesheet" opens "timesheet_2011.ods" from my dropbox account...

I can't find anything like this in Gnome 3. I know that there is a list of "recent items", and also the name of bookmarked folders in nautilus is searched, but that's not (exactly) what I'm looking for...

So, what I want is this:

tell Gnome 3 where my files are (certainly not only in my home folder)
have them searched on the fly while I'm typing

I think Unity offers something like this - but hey, I'm using Gnome 3 ;-)

Anything I missed?

you can try kupfer sudo apt-get install kupfer you can search for files and even laucnhe apps and more you can check the wiki here — kosaidpo, Jan 16 '12 at 21:00
@kosaidpo - thx for answering. Interesting project, looks pretty close to gnome-do to me. I asked this question rather to find out if I missed anything in gnome 3's basic functionality. Using one application launcher (kupfer / gnome-do) on top of another feels kind of overkill, no to mention the different key bindings... Would be interesting to find out if this would work, though — Jan Groth, Jan 17 '12 at 10:34

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 30 '12 at 00:38

2

Actually, there is something like this with zeitgeist, but the project is far from ready and, as you pointed out, it only searches your history. It might be interesting to make an extension for the gnome shell that uses '/usr/bin/locate' in combination with a list of extensions a user might search for. I'm not really sure how the API works...

answered Apr 30 '12 at 00:38

astex

1,081

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/284/tracker-search/ does it using tracker, but it duplicates some of the features present in zeitgeist and takes a while to index. I'm guessing this will be available in gnome-shell 3.6 in a few months. – astex May 03 '12 at 03:01

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Jul 02 '12 at 10:57

1

Debian package zeitgeist-extension-fts description:

full text search extension for the Zeitgeist engine

edited Jul 02 '12 at 10:57

Eliah Kagan

117,780

answered Jun 04 '12 at 02:54

agnomefan

11

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 12 '13 at 19:54

1

There is a gnome extension, it looks like it works:

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/284/tracker-search/

answered Apr 12 '13 at 19:54

Paolo Benvenuto

133

1

I recommend expanding this to explain explicitly how to install it, and also to explain how Tracker works, how this extension depends on it, and how to install Tracker if it is not installed. – Eliah Kagan Apr 12 '13 at 20:16
Unfortunatly this extension hasn't been updated for the last gnome versions. :-( – Paolo Benvenuto Oct 10 '13 at 17:42

Jan Groth · Answer 4 · 2012-01-19T10:53:59.790

1

To answer my own question after some deeper research:

No, there is nothing I missed. You cannot configure gnome 3 to search files and folders. "Recently used items" is a help, also "Bookmarked folders". But nothing like gnome-do exists. Yet. Hopefully.

edited Jan 19 '12 at 10:53

answered Jan 18 '12 at 09:36

Jan Groth

403

Thanks for the update, that's really too bad. You'd think something as simple as quickly navigating to a file would be an important function with all the "rethinking" being one. Interestingly, I'm also not impressed with the way Unity navigates the file structure either, I was still using Gnome-Do in Unity before switching to Gnome 3. – Chris Bauer Apr 27 '12 at 08:54

On-the-fly file search in gnome 3?

4 Answers4