Description
DocFetcher is an Open Source desktop search application: It
allows you to quickly access documents on your computer by
typing keywords. - You can think of it as Google for your
local
document repository. The
application is currently available for Windows and
GTK-based Linux
distributions.
How It Works
- DocFetcher creates so-called index files on which the searches are performed. You can either create permanent indexes for large document repositories that change infrequently, or temporary ones for quick full-text searches in small folders.
- Temporary indexes can be created by rightclicking on a folder and selecting the menu item "Search With DocFetcher", and they are automatically disposed of after program termination. (You can of course tell DocFetcher to keep them.)
- The indexing process might take a few minutes for larger repositories, and is usually a matter of seconds for small folders (200 documents = about 1 min.).
- After index creation, you can type keywords into DocFetcher's search box, e.g. "fourier analysis" and hit Enter. Then DocFetcher will list all documents inside the selected folders that contain these words - most of the time in less than a second.
But There's More To It...
- Automatic index updates: Indexes are updated automatically when files in the corresponding folders are modified, even when DocFetcher isn't running. This is done via a daemon that waits in the background and watches all indexed folders. The daemon has very low CPU usage, because, rather than indexing files itself, it only remembers which indexes need to be updated the next time DocFetcher is launched.
- A portable version: Runs on both Windows and Linux. You can put all your documents in it and then freely move the entire folder around (i.e., DocFetcher + indexes + documents). Possible destinations include other computers, encrypted volumes (TrueCrypt), CD-ROMs and USB drives. The portable version can also be used for sharing an indexed document repository across a local area network, or across the OS'ses of a Windows/Linux dual boot system.
- Detection of HTML pairs, e.g. "foo.htm" and a folder named "foo_files". Each pair will be treated as a single document. This feature may seem rather useless on first sight, but it turned out that this dramatically increases the quality of the search results when you're searching for HTML files, since all the "clutter" inside the HTML folders disappears from the results.
- Search in source code files: The file extensions by which DocFetcher recognizes plain text and HTML files can be fully customized. Therefore you can use DocFetcher to search in any kind of source code.
Other Notable Features
- Regular expression based exclusion of files from indexing.
- Various file operations on the document repository can be performed through DocFetcher's interface (e.g. creating folders, inserting new files).
- Preview panel with search-term highlighting and a simple built-in web browser.
- Search results can be sorted and filtered by different criteria (filetype, filesize, path, etc.).
- Global hotkey to bring DocFetcher to the front.
Supported Document Formats
- HTML and plain text (both customizable)
- Portable Document Format (pdf)
- Microsoft Office (doc, xls, ppt)
- Microsoft Office 2007 (docx, xlsx, pptx)
- OpenOffice.org Writer, Calc, Draw and Impress (odt, ods, odg, odp)
- Rich Text Format (rtf)
- AbiWord (abw, abw.gz, zabw)
- Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (chm)
- Microsoft Visio (vsd)
- Scalable Vector Graphics (svg)
What Some People Think About This Program...
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Comparison To Other Desktop Search Applications
At least two things set DocFetcher apart from other desktop search applications, such as Google Desktop. First, it defaults to indexing only what you need, not to indexing the entire harddrive, and second, it indexes documents only - pictures, music, videos, etc. are omitted. Here's why we believe this is just fine the way it is:- The bigger the search scope, the more "noise" there will be in the search results. Accordingly, you will find that DocFetcher generally gives better search results than similar programs.
- Less files to index = faster indexing and decreased CPU usage. (Don't you just hate it when there's always some program busily working in the background?)
- The real power of Google and other web search engines comes from document indexing, because it gives a very good approximation of the content of a document. Indexing images or videos however isn't all that useful, because the real content of an image or a video is not accessible via text extraction.
- Why install yet another program to access images,
music, videos, e-mails, etc., if your favorite picture browser, media player, e-mail
client, and so on, has been optimized for many years to do just that? Why would you use a half-baken, generic search interface then? So, no images, no music, no videos... - what's
left? Documents. And that's what DocFetcher is good for. (By
the
way, Launchy
is recommended for quickly launching start menu entries.)
