@ qforce:
Nice piece of software. Looks like it is based on the Eclipse IDE (which is something I appreciate).

Too bad about the need for indexing (a personal distaste), but that is something I can get over it since it can also search through *.doc files.

With Foxit Reader it is possible to search through multiple PDF files, so I used to convert any of my *.doc files to PDF format (with OpenOffice). Your software eliminates that need, at the cost of indexing. Well, I can get around my distaste.

Thanks again.  

About the user preferences:
Google search is dead simple, which is why it is so popular and used so much by everyone and their grandma. Savvy users know about its filters and are even more productive.

That kind of thinking should also apply to applications. Dead simple so it can be used by everyone, while in the right hands the same software becomes a productive power tool.

When you make such software, how long will it then take for the big software players to gobble up your talent? So let them buy you out after some, enjoy life from the interest those millions generate. By know you are in the ideal position to not care about who prefers whatever.

Your mind is too many steps ahead at this moment 

Launchy does not search contents, it's a program launcher

@ qforce:
Nice piece of software. Looks like it is based on the Eclipse IDE (which is something I appreciate).

Yes, you are right. DocFetcher and Eclipse are based on the same GUI toolkit (named SWT), and DocFetcher is being developed in the Eclipse IDE.

When you make such software, how long will it then take for the big software players to gobble up your talent? So let them buy you out after some, enjoy life from the interest those millions generate. By know you are in the ideal position to not care about who prefers whatever.

Your mind is too many steps ahead at this moment 

I never wanted to work in a big software company. I'm basically a (would-be) scientist who just wrote an utility to better manage his science-related resources and who then decided to share his work with others. And I do care about the needs of my users, because for me, Open Source is basically some sort of "charity".

Hi,

I'm the project admin of DocFetcher, an Open Source desktop search app. I've noticed in several posts in this thread that there seems to be a real need for e-mail indexing and the likes, which puzzles me a bit. More precisely: Why do you guys need an additional program to search your local e-mails when you could use the search feature of your respective e-mail client instead?

I agree with you when e-mails are involved but their respective attachments are completely different thing, in this case you do need a DtS software.

On a more general note, are there any people out there who definitely need a desktop search app to locate images, music, videos, etc.? If so, then why don't you use your picture managers, media players, etc. to do that? Wouldn't that be a much more efficient and appropriate way to organize images, music, etc.?

I'd be thankful for any enlightenment about this issue.

Creating and maintaining hierachies takes time, that'a a fact and probably the most important reason for using DtS. Because I don't want to spend time for that  the rest my answers follow:

a.Images - can be found in many places therefore I use DtS to find them all and then I view them as thumbnails...and thus the decision is easiest
b. Music - here you can, generally search by filename...or metadata/tags. Or, can be leftovers(.ac3 files) from video conversions(DVD->.avi) that, in time, can stack up heavily...
c. Videos - when you use several sources for getting them on your computer they can also get lost in various places, especially when you have more than 1 HDD. For now I have more than 60 movies on my computer...mpeg/avi/iso/vob, you name it.

I also do not think that the typical savvy DtS user is searching mainly for the above but rather for documents with a certain content, at least this is my case. My search ratio is 95%/5% for content/a,v,p.

Btw, DocFetcher 1.0 is (probably) about to be released this month and adds support for MS Office 2007 and WordPerfect.

I gave it a try for a folder with less than 500 indexable documents and I got 2 messages:
Needed 19 bytes to create the next chunk header, but only found 4 bytes, ignoring rest of data
### Skipped: Not enough memory left in the Java Virtual Machine.
Also I didn't get what I was expecting from a Boolean search:

search:"word1 word2"
returned a diffent set(number) of documents compared to
search:word1 word2
but in preview in both cases I saw enlightened both search terms(???).

So, for now I wish you all the best but I stick to Autofocus

I agree with you when e-mails are involved but their respective attachments are completely different thing, in this case you do need a DtS software.

Now I understand

Creating and maintaining hierachies takes time, that'a a fact and probably the most important reason for using DtS. Because I don't want to spend time for that  the rest my answers follow:

a.Images - can be found in many places therefore I use DtS to find them all and then I view them as thumbnails...and thus the decision is easiest
b. Music - here you can, generally search by filename...or metadata/tags. Or, can be leftovers(.ac3 files) from video conversions(DVD->.avi) that, in time, can stack up heavily...
c. Videos - when you use several sources for getting them on your computer they can also get lost in various places, especially when you have more than 1 HDD. For now I have more than 60 movies on my computer...mpeg/avi/iso/vob, you name it.

I also do not think that the typical savvy DtS user is searching mainly for the above but rather for documents with a certain content, at least this is my case. My search ratio is 95%/5% for content/a,v,p.

You seem to be the kind of user who doesn't clean up his folders very often and who then uses full hard drive desktop search to keep that mess under control. Don't get me wrong though, I don't think there's anything wrong with doing it this way. (I'm the kind of user who's folders are highly organized and who only uses desktop search to access stuff where the hierarchical system doesn't help much, i.e. documents.)

I gave it a try for a folder with less than 500 indexable documents and I got 2 messages:
Needed 19 bytes to create the next chunk header, but only found 4 bytes, ignoring rest of data
### Skipped: Not enough memory left in the Java Virtual Machine.

The Java Virtual Machine in which DocFetcher is running has a memory cap, and your file was too big for that. The manual explains how to raise that cap. However, I admit that this error message should've been more helpful.

Also I didn't get what I was expecting from a Boolean search:

search:"word1 word2"
returned a diffent set(number) of documents compared to
search:word1 word2
but in preview in both cases I saw enlightened both search terms(???).

The first case is AND, the second one is OR. Well, the preview highlighting wasn't fully implemented... Thanks for pointing this out.

So, for now I wish you all the best but I stick to Autofocus

To each his own. 

You seem to be the kind of user who doesn't clean up his folders very often and who then uses full hard drive desktop search to keep that mess under control. Don't get me wrong though, I don't think there's anything wrong with doing it this way. (I'm the kind of user who's folders are highly organized and who only uses desktop search to access stuff where the hierarchical system doesn't help much, i.e. documents.)

I've tried to organize my stuff (email, documents, and photos) hierarchically through folders in the filesystem. But it just doesn't work. The problem is that even in the most vanilla cases, a given object falls into multiple buckets. A given photo might belong in "Photos of Cathy", "Mexico 2008 Vacation" and "Sunsets". A given document here at work might be related to both the customer that instigated the work as well as the subsystem that needs to be customized.

Keeping multiple copies, one in each applicable bucket, won't work. You wind up changing alternate copies and creating multiple divergent versions, rather than a single version that contains all updates. In theory you might use links within the filesystem, but I don't know of any tools for any OS that makes this manageable.

The only alternative is to search the objects themselves, whether that means a full content search or just a search of tags in the objects' metadata. And I've found that, while I'm always wishing for better tools, I am able to accomplish my needs successfully with what's available today.

The first case is AND, the second one is OR.

Greetings.

What would be the required syntax if one tries to find documents that contain certain strings?
As much as I knew
"word1 word2"
was suppose to that job whereas
word1 word2
is the equivalent of AND, do please correct me if I am wrong.

Regarding creating and maintaining hierarchies I must admit that somehow I always knew that this isn't for me, I simply don't have the patience for that. In my particular case I have thousands of documents that have a meaningful description at the folder level only and filenames like: Part1.doc, Part2.doc, etc OR complex documents that contain multiple subjects (and that's where proximity search comes very usefull for narrowing down the big initial list...) so it's not even worth trying...

All the best.

As for the problems with the hierarchical file system, have you guys considered "albums" and similar features which are provided by decent picture managers and media players these days? This is basically a way to put files into multiple categories.

That's exactly what I'm getting at. I don't know of any other tool that can search through, e.g., ACDSee's database. However, any photo album app will allow you to save tags into EXIF or IPTC metadata in the images themselves. And since this is a standard, any desktop search app worth its salt can access it.

Having done that, now I can use my search app to find, say, "Mexico 2008" and get all my related photos, emails exchanged with the travel agent, and the AVI of the time-lapse sunset I made. Sure, all of these things are handled through different apps. But the ability to search like this allows me to have all of the materials related to a given project in front of me at once. (Which is why I also think that the Windows way of organizing files under "My Documents" in app-centric folders is idiotic)

I never used that sort of thing, though, because of the potential risk of vendor lock-in (meaning that all that categorization data is lost when I move to another program).

Open source people sometimes amaze me. You refuse to use any such program (even though, as I noted, there's a standard way for them to store their data in most cases), despite how much good it might do you.

That's exactly what I'm getting at. I don't know of any other tool that can search through, e.g., ACDSee's database. However, any photo album app will allow you to save tags into EXIF or IPTC metadata in the images themselves. And since this is a standard, any desktop search app worth its salt can access it.

Having done that, now I can use my search app to find, say, "Mexico 2008" and get all my related photos, emails exchanged with the travel agent, and the AVI of the time-lapse sunset I made. Sure, all of these things are handled through different apps. But the ability to search like this allows me to have all of the materials related to a given project in front of me at once. (Which is why I also think that the Windows way of organizing files under "My Documents" in app-centric folders is idiotic)

Some people are just too lazy to add half a dozen tags to each and every image they store on their computer. Do you really do that?
On a related note I'd like to mention delicious.com, a social bookmarking site. This site allows you to assign multiple tags to a bookmark. which sounds awesome in theory (multiple categorization, yay!), but after a while I stopped bothering with all this tagging. Not sure why, but it felt like "too much work"... It seems there's a subtle, but significant difference between tagging and the capability to put a file in more than one folder.

Open source people sometimes amaze me. You refuse to use any such program (even though, as I noted, there's a standard way for them to store their data in most cases), despite how much good it might do you.

Maybe I should also mention the second reason why I don't use albums and the likes: I don't have too many pictures on my computer (a few hundred or so, rarely updated), and I stopped collecting music a long time ago (last.fm anyone?), so there's not much to organize here. This is not too amazing an explanation, is it?

BTW, AutoFocus is also base partially on Lucene so that should make it quite familiar to you...
All the best.

It looked fairly interesting until I read the hardware requirements section...

Which is exactly why I'm obsessed with Powermarks and related bookmark managers like Linkman.  I just want to dump everything in a container and find it almost instantly.  No tagging or organizing.

For the same reason, I too was a big fan of Powermarks and am now an even bigger fan of Linkman.  But that still leaves me with thousands of digital photos on my computer.  I wish I could locate individual photos as easily as I can my  bookmarks in Linkman.  In theory, metadata tags would probably do what I need, but I can't imagine trying to retro-tag thousands of photos.   

Some people are just too lazy to add half a dozen tags to each and every image they store on their computer. Do you really do that?

Actually ACDSee Photo Manager makes adding tags/categories very simple and easy to do for entire folders very quickly. I upgraded recently to their 2009 version and started a new database fresh, so I had to tag them all again. Since I have a good folder hierarchy already built I was able to tag more than 6,000 photos in less than an hour. Still have a ways to go though - I have a total of just under 20,000 photos!

Jim