Re: Indexed search with grep-like output

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 3:59 AM, Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>> What I am saying is we could probably do it the other way round: Use
>> the same backend for the functionality of locate, id-util and in
>> addition free text search.
>
> I have no idea what that means, but I'll assume we agree: have a command
> that can run a variety of external tools like `locate', or GNU id, or
> Beagle, or ...

Sure, we are just saying it a bit different. To be clear, here is an example:

- An Emacs command like "locate" which is meant to use a backend with
an index could use several backends for that. idxsearch.el could
provide a backend for it and so could the unix command "locate".

When idxsearch.el is used it can (hopefully) use different indexing
search engines. Currently, in the first version, it supports only
Windows Desktop Search (because that is what I have here), but I hope
someone else can tweak the ruby file idxsearch.rb for other indexing
search engines, for example Lucene.

Note: At the moment I tossed away the "locate" functionality in
idxsearch.el, but it will be there again soon.


The idea of an indexed "id" search could be thought of similar.


> If you really mean to provide various commands that all end up running
> one particular external tool, then I don't understand why you'd want
> that, since AFAICT there is no standard "external search tool" (there
> may exist such a thing on some platforms, but we'd want those commands
> to work on all platforms, so they'll necessarily need to support various
> backends).

Not one particular external tool, but one particular type of externa
tool, i.e. an indexed text search engine for the desktop (or
computer). I guess they all are similar enough to fit here. (But that
is a guess, some ideas used in implementation really surprises me in
that they lack useful things that easily could have been provided.)