Linux download of the week: Tracker desktop indexer
Tracker is a desktop indexer, though it might be easier to just think of it as a desktop search tool. It indexes your files–all types–using file contents and metadata. What separates it from the other popular linux desktop search tool, beagle, is that Tracker allows you to tag files. Yup, that’s right, you can tag your files and search by tag now! Tracker includes a command line and gui tool for searching. If that weren’t enough, there are other frontends, such as Affinity-search, Catfish, and even Nautilus.
Screenshot tour
Here’s the basic gui of Tracker built from svn. Note the blue bar with the arrow?
The blue bar opens up, revealing the tagging gui.
Here’s Tracker’s Nautilus integration. To achieve this, you have to build Nautilus yourself; when you run ./configure, it will automatically detect Tracker support. If you don’t build Tracker from source, you’ll need to get the Tracker-dev package. Note that you can limit the search to a particular location and filetype.
Another way to access Tracker search is via the Deskbar Applet. This is by far my favorite way to do a Tracker search.
I haven’t experimented enough with the tagging feature to report on it. I’m interested to find out what happens if I tag a file in Tracker and then change its location; will Tracker update the link?
While Beagle might offer indexing of more file types, tracker has planned support for playlists, notes, applications, contact, IM logs, appointments, tasks, browser bookmarks, browser history, and projects.
Another benefit of Tracker is that it is pretty light on resources. Beagle brought this old Toshiba Portege 3500 I’m using to a hault on many occasions, so much so that I ended up removing it. During the initial indexing, Tracker slowed me down a bit, but after that it’s entirely unremarkable in terms of resource usage.
Links: Tracker, Beagle, Affinity-search, Deskbar Applet, Catfish
