Re: Indexed search with grep-like output

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

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 4:21 AM, Lennart Borgman
<lennart.borgman@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 5:14 AM, Lennart Borgman
> <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 5:10 AM, Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>>>> I have now added support for Google Desktop Search too (the grepping
>>>> is not added there yet though). It feels snappier, but the timing
>>>> tells me it should be about the same as Windows Desktop Search. Wonder
>>>> if I did something wrong... ;-)
>>>
>>> Clearly, the wrong thing you did is focus on non-Free tools.
>>
>> ;-)
>>
>> That is not my fault. Those are the only tools I could find that are
>> easy to setup on w32.
>>
>> Anyway I hope the structure is good enough to add free tools. (For
>> someone using GNU/Linux probably much easier. At least that is my
>> impression. Nearly all non-trivial free tools are a pain to setup on
>> w32. And that is part of the reason they are not gaining ground, at
>> least that is my guess.)
>
>
> As Eli suggested docindexer (which is free) and there is an installer
> for that I added support for docindexer too.
>
> It works nicely for what it does. However unfortunately it is still
> unusable since the binary version of docindexer currently does not let
> you tell which files extensions it should index as text. I have asked
> the author/maintainer of docindexer, Stuart Rackham, for help and hope
> he will fix it.

I have got a reply from Stuart now and he confirms that you can not
use the easy installed binary distribution on w32 if you want to
change the file types that are indexed.

This may make it a less good alternative for those who want to use it
for Emacs on w32. However it is still usable with idxsearch.el.

To summarize:

- There are now support for 3 search engines:

  1) docindexer - free and easy to install, but you can't change the
file types indexed (easily).

  2) Google Desktop Search - easy to install and runs on free systems
too. You have to add a plugin to support new file types.

  3) Windows Desktop Search - comes with the system, but you have to
install ruby to use it with Emacs.

Of these Google Desktop Search seems to be the best alternative for a
user. (And it gives the best output too.)

I have not find any other indexed search engines that are easy to
install on w32. (Others might be very easy to install on GNU/Linux,
but I see no reason to install them on w32 since they require more of
your time.)


idxsearch.el and its companions are not yet quite ready though.
Comments are welcome.