kio-locate: A KDE I/O Slave
Probably you know the locate command for doing quick file searches. kio-locate enables you, to start such a search from konqueror.
- To search using locate you don't have to switch to a prompt.
- The search results are shown to you, as if you were in a directory. Any found file is just one click away.
- You could e.g. move all found files using Drag & Drop.
- And all that's possible from practically any KDE program, that can open files.
Perhaps you should just take a look at the screenshots.
Unfortunately, I currently don't have the time to maintain kio-locate
.
Many thanks to Tobi Vollebregt who has been improving kio-locate
as a participant of Googles "Summer of Code". Thank you very much!
Changelog
kio-locate 0.4.5 | 2006/02/05 | Armin Straub | |
* | Search hits with non-ascii characters in the file name always showed up with invalid size/owner/group information (fixed by Johan Billing). | ||
* | kio-locate should now compile with gcc-4.1_beta (fixed by Jan Jitse Venselaar). | ||
* | Updated to bksys 1.5.1. | ||
kio-locate 0.4.4 | 2005/10/19 | Armin Straub | |
+ | Warn if locate (or whatever is selected) is not installed (suggested by Axel K. Braun). | ||
* | Use slocate and rlocate as default when available (suggested by Nicolas Degand). | ||
* | Closed a bug preventing the display of items having the same prefix (reported by Takis). | ||
More ... |
Download kio-locate
You can download kio-locate either as a debian package or as full sourcecode.
Link | Size | Description | Hits |
---|---|---|---|
kio-locate_0.4.5.tar.gz | 151.64 KB | kio-locate 0.4.5 (source code) | 3322 |
kio-locate_0.4.5-1_i386.deb | 101.49 KB | kio-locate 0.4.5 (Debian/sid, thanks to Karsten Schulz) | 3863 |
kio-locate_0.4.4.tar.gz | 151.98 KB | kio-locate 0.4.4 (source code) | 1746 |
More Downloads... |
Some TODOs
Short Term | |
Mid Term | |
+ | Add kio-locate to kde-extragear. |
+ | Translations needed. Contact Håvard Dahle for Norwegian translation. |
+ | Support searches on remote servers via ssh. A possible search could then look like "locate://username@server:port pattern". (Suggested by Ferdinand Gassauer) |
Ideas | |
+ | Some kind of first start screen? |
+ | Check out beagle-query which was said to behave similar to command line locate. (Benjamin Kudria) |
+ | Use other backends like kat? |
How to use this?
You can use kio-locate mostly as you use locate. Instead of typing
$ locate pattern
at a prompt, you start the search with kio-locate directly in konqueror. You just enter locate:pattern
as the address.
New: Configure kio-locate
Starting with version 0.4.0
you can configure kio-locate by entering locater:config
in konqueror's adress bar (note the r
).
A normal search using locate:pattern
is case insensitive. But if your search contains upper case characters, the search switches to case sensitivity. You can change this behaviour using locater:config
.
How to write Patterns
- Furthermore you can't use a backslash as the last character of your query. O.k. you can, but KDE will ignore it. In such a case you can quote your pattern: Write
locate:"servicemenus/"
rather thanlocate:servicemenus/
. - A search as e.g.
locate:~/*.doc
works as you might expect. This means that~/
and~user/
are expanded correctly at the beginning of the pattern. - In older versions of KDE you can't use a star (*) for a pattern in konqueror. Therefor every plus (+) in a search is used just as a star (*) is. Instead of
locate:*.html
you may also typelocate:+.html
. - Should you need to use a plus in your search you have to escape it with a backslash. Instead of
locate:g++
you have to uselocate:g\+\+
.
New: Using Filters
Often you will get lots of results using locate. To filter your search you could use
$ locate kdeprint | grep -v apidocs | grep lib
on the command line to find those files matching kdeprint that don't contain api-docs but lib.
Starting with version 0.3.0 kio-locate has builtin support for such filtering. You can e.g. use locate:kdeprint !api-docs lib
to get the same results as above.
You can use arbitrarily many filtering expressions. Those that should not match are prepended by !
. To use regular expressions you can use rlocate
instead of locate
as the protocol.
You can add arbitrary filters to a white- resp. blacklist (using locater:config
). This way you can restrict your search to certain folders generally or exclude single directories. If you e.g. replace .
by /home/.
in your whitelist you will only find files under /home afterwards.
Using this as the default search engine
Since version 0.3.1 you are enabled to select kio-locate as konquerors default search engine (under Web Shortcuts). Whenever you enter an url then, that konqueror can't deal with, a search using locate will be started.
So you can just enter a filename and konqueror will search for it. This saves you the characters needed for the usuallay prepended locate:
.