My Favorite Linux Search Tools Make It Easy to Find Your Files – No Command Line Required

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ZDNET Highlights

• Make searching for files easy with these GUI tools.
• Each of these apps will work on most distributions.
• You can install these tools for free.

In the early days of Linux, finding files was a command-line affair using either find or find . Although the tools were suitable for the job, sometimes they couldn’t find what I was looking for or required complex regular expressions to work properly.

New users of Linux should avoid using regular expressions. This is especially true now, with many great GUI applications available for Linux. After all, why would you bother with the command line when you can point and click to find the files and folders you need?

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GUI apps also have more options and customization available, making them more useful and user-friendly. And they work really well.

I will say that there are some GUIs specifically for search that don’t work as well as others, so I’ve limited my list to the ones I know and work well.

That said, let’s look at the list of four Linux search GUIs.

1. Catfish

Catfish have been around for a long time. I remember using this app in the early 2000s and thinking it wasn’t bad, but could use some use. However, today’s catfish is really good – and very fast.

Although Catfish is the default search for Xfce desktops, it works perfectly fine on most Linux desktops. The Catfish GUI is well designed and easy to use. Catfish uses fuzzy search, so you don’t need to be precise with your capitalization or complete with your search string.

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For example, I created three files in my Documents directory: zdnet_test.ods, zdnet_test.odt, and zdnet_test.txt. I could search zdnet, ZDNET, ZDnet, zdNet, or whatever and Catfish found what I was looking for.

One thing Catfish can’t do is search within files, but you can at least specify a time range for your search, which can be helpful on systems with large numbers of files.

Catfish can be installed from your distribution’s standard repositories using its GUI app store, and is free to use.

2. FSearch

FSearch was inspired by the Everything Search tool for Windows (created by zero equipment) and runs incredibly fast. FSearch is not only one of the fastest search tools available for Linux, but it also searches as you type; You don’t even have to finish typing the search string before results appear.

FSearch supports regular search strings as well as regex (regular expressions). You can also open a file directly from within FSearch by double-clicking on the desired result.

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One thing to know about FSearch: you have to add directories to the database before you can search. For example, I opened Preferences, clicked on Databases, and added my home directory. Once it was added, it was indexed and searchable. If you do not add directories to the database, your searches will come up empty. You can add as many directories to the database as needed.

You will also get both included and excluded options. For example, you might want to include your home directory, but exclude your .cache subfolder.

From within Preferences, you can also configure when to update the database. This is an important feature because it ensures that any new files you’ve added since the last time you used FSearch will be available. You can either configure the database to update every time FSearch starts, or set it for time-based updates.

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FSearch isn’t able to search within files, but it does an excellent job of searching your files by name.

FSearch can be installed for free from the standard repositories of your distribution.

3. Espionage

Snoop is able to search not only file names, but also strings within files. There is one caveat about Snoop’s ability to search within files: Snoop is only able to search within text files. I ran a quick test by adding the string “Linux” to both the .txt and .odt file. Snoop was able to find Linux in the .txt file, but not the .odt file. I’m assuming this is because .odt documents are compressed binary files, and Snoop is not able to search in them.

Snoop is quite easy to use, but you will need to set your path before running the search. You don’t need to set a clear path. For example, if you set the path to your home directory, Snoop will also search each child directory (such as Documents).

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One caveat to Snoop is that it does not allow you to set excluded directories; You’ll see results from your .config, .cache, and similar directories, which means you may have a little more trouble finding the results.

Snoop can be installed for free from your distribution’s standard repositories.

4. Albert

Albert is more than just a file search tool – it’s also a desktop launcher. With Albert, you can search files, open apps, run ChatGPT queries, run web searches, search Chromium bookmarks, search YouTube, and much more. You can also create your own plugins to further extend Albert’s features.

Albert is the Linux app you didn’t know you needed.

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One feature I wish Albert added is the ability to search for strings within files. Hopefully this will be made possible in a future release.

One thing to keep in mind: you’ll need to enable the Files plugin, as it’s not set by default. To do this, open Albert’s Settings window and go to the Plugins tab. Click the checkbox associated with the files, and you’re ready to go.

Albert has a bit of a learning curve, but once you get up to speed on it, you’ll find that it’s incredibly useful.

Albert can be installed for free by downloading the installer to your distribution vbs download page,