mhoyeMay 11, 2024
I'm on here looking for text indexers and everything is 'lightning fast exoscale terafloops that scales to enterprise quantawarbles with polytopplic performanations' and it would be great if this industry could breathe into a bag until it remembers that one person with one computer is a constituency that matters.
Show threadJef Poskanzer
@mhoye My one person / one computer search toolbox:
- Just use egrep, or an equivalent linear search tool.
- If egrep is too slow, it might be due to searching lots of separate files, because filesystems are slow. Try pre-processing by concatening all the files into one.
So far I have not needed a third tool.
May 11, 2024 at 2:56pmWeb
Show threadDan RileyMay 11, 2024
@jef @mhoye back in the I’d say glimpse, https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/focal/man1/glimpse.1.html but it doesn’t look like there’s any active maintenance
Ubuntu Manpage: glimpse - search quickly through entire file systems

Show threadmhoyeMay 11, 2024
@dan131riley @jef Glimpse, Woosh and a few others have been mostly abandoned, it looks like.
Show threadmhoyeMay 11, 2024
@jef I could gin something up in with egrep without a ton of effort, sure, but that fundamentally presupposes that I already know what I'm looking for, as represented on disk in string form. I'm also interested in ease of access for people who haven't been neck deep in the shell for decades, but maybe more importantly, in _casual_ discoverability. I mean, who just opens a dictionary, looks up the word they were after and closes it again?
Show threadEli the BeardedMay 11, 2024
@jef @mhoye I use grep or ripgrep a lot of the time but it really sucks for the case of "find these three words in any order in the same paragraph" and I would like to do things like that sometimes.