What would you experts use?

[sabot7726]

Hello,

I work in a 911 center where we have a ton of word docs, image files, pdfs, etc on all kinds of things supporting police, fire and medical services. We're looking for the best way to have instant access to the info we need.

The progression over time has gone from huge binders, to an internal sharepoint page, to something like baregrep and FARR which gave me the info I needed as fast as I could type it.

My problem now is, there are several users who are not especially computer savvy and we'd have a hard time getting them converted to using different programs for different things.

What I'm looking for is *one* app that someone could use where they could hit a hotkey, start typing and have the proper thing float to the top, whether it was the name of a file or somewhere in the contents of the file. If I could wave a magic wand, it would have the relevance and filename-searching features of FARR but combined with the grep-on-the-fly feature of baregrep.

It seems like something like this is already around but I have yet to find it.

If you guys had a ton of various filetypes and wanted to be able to instantly get to the relevant one you wanted, what would you use?

-Mike

[tinjaw]

It appears that FARR is a UI that appeals to you. You might be able to achieve what you want via FARR plugins. For example, it would be easy to provide a grep search of documents (probably via a indexing engine) through a plugin. As long as you had the appropriate viewers for all the various documents on the systems you should be able to view the documents easy enough.

[lanux128]

i second what tinjaw mentioned. since you're already using Farr, you can just add plugins like TinyEverything (filename based searches) and Farr Windows Search (content-based searches). also another plugin that could benefit you is GooglePlus which shows you the Google search results in FARR as you type.

[sabot7726]

Ok I hadn't seen those yet, I'll check 'em out. Is there any way to make it so people don't have to put ws in front of their searches and it would just search the normal FARR way and with ws?

[steeladept]

I am no programmer, but it seems to me it would be fairly trivial to make a plugin or setting change to prefix ws in front of ALL entries if that is what would be desired.  I wouldn't suggest it for general use, but this one is pretty specific, so I seems logical to do.

[sabot7726]

I checked out the WDS plugin and it works well. I don't think I'll be able to get away with having to load windows desktop search on 60 computers and tune it to only check 1 folder though :/

Also I'm missing the instant results I get with baregrep. Anyone know of a grep plugin for FARR?

Still gotta check out tinyeverything

[sabot7726]

The more I look at it, the more it seems FARR would be perfect if it had a small addition. I'm curious if someone would be interested in coding it?

The normal mode of FARR where it searches and displays matches for filenames is perfect for that half, and I like that it sorts relevancy, etc.

I'd be willing to donate to someone's beer fund if we could figure out a way to also add a grep function that would display in perhaps a lower window under the normal FARR results. Specifically, I have a single text file with a ton of normal text that I'd like it to search for and grep results.

So in theory, my user would hit a hotkey, type what they want and it would both search the normal FARR way but also return results as people type that match information in the text file. I don't need anything special like all kinds of regex stuff, just needs to match what I'm typing as I type it

If anyones interested, please let me know! I'd love to work together with someone on this. As a 911 dispatcher, any chance we get to shave even seconds off how long it takes to look something up, we love it.