If you have a Windows PC, you know how slow file searches can be, and we've talked before about how Everything is a perfect replacement for the built-in search engine. Everything automatically indexes all your files in just a few seconds and makes them all searchable instantly.
Linux may be better than Windows, but the file search built into many of the file managers available by default is still not particularly great every time. So what if there was something like Everything, but for Linux? There is; it's called FSearch, and if you need to find files frequently, it's everything you could want.
Typical file searches can be slow
It's not just a Windows problem
Linux is better than Windows in a lot of ways, but the file managers that come with a given desktop environment or distro aren't necessarily perfect, either. I use Arch Linux with KDE Plasma, and Dolphin is a fine file manager in general. But when I try and search for files within a folder, it does take a couple of seconds for results to show up, especially if I'm searching my entire home folder.
It can also take a bit of extra time to search the right place, since you typically have to navigate to the folder you want to search in each time, or at least change the search settings to include the entire computer, and that setting also has to be selected for each search. That may vary with other file managers, but file search performance isn't the main focus of this kind of software, which is where FSearch comes in.
FSearch changes the game
Instant searches
FSearch is a Linux app that's available through a few methods, with downloads available on the official website. But most importantly to me, it's also available as a Flatpak on Flathub, which makes it easy to install on pretty much any Linux distro.
Once it's installed, FSearch will prompt you to choose the folders you want to index. Unlike Everything, it doesn't index your entire system by default, but you can choose what you want to include. The Linux filesystem can get a bit messy and there are a ton of files and folders you probably don't want to touch, so it makes sense not to include every single folder. After selecting the folders to index, you just need to wait a few seconds for everything to be indexed, and then you're ready to go.
In my case, I indexed the /home/ folder and that added up to a little over 420,000 entries. Before you start searching, every single file and folder in your index is shown in the UI, and then you can start typing in the search bar at the top to get absolutely instant results. It's always fascinating to see how quickly the results of your query show up, especially when there's a lot of them. This may be partly because there's really no logic being applied to the search results that could require more processing. Anything that matches the text string you entered, regardless of whether that text is at the start of the file name, a separate word, or jumbled in the middle of the file name. Regardless, it's fast and efficient.
Plenty of search options
Including RegEx support
Searching for a file isn't always straightforward. You may remember only a small portion of the file name, or have a general idea of what's included but not remember everything. Thankfully, FSearch supports simple wildcards, so by adding an asterisk at the start or end of a search, you can match file names that have additional text before or after the text in your query. You can also use a question mark to match exactly one unknown character, and operators like AND are supported if you want to specify more than one search criterion.
In fact, there's quite a lot you can specify with your searches in FSearch. You can begin a search with folder: to only see folders in your results, or conversely, look for files only with file:, which can help narrow down results a lot. You can even go as far as specifying the number of items in the folder you're searching for, the size of the item you want to find, or its depth in the file system tree.
What's more, FSearch also supports RegEx for even more specific search conditions. Regular expressions, or RegEx, can define text or number strings in various ways, so you can be a bit more specific without knowing the exact file name, which can help.
The best search tool out there
It's both fast and effective
Before I tried FSearch, I also decided to check out the built-in file search in Vicinae, another tool I also love for various reasons. Admittedly, Vicinae is also extremely fast at surfacing results, but the problem is it's not really as customizable. It indexes your home directory, and at least through the UI, there isn't much you can do to change that. Plus, it lacks all the advanced search features that FSearch has.
Simply put, FSearch is the ultimate file search tool for Linux. Between its speed and customizability, there's no reason to use anything else if you want the most effective way to find any and all files on your system. You can check and download FSearch below for a manual install, but the app is also available on some common package managers like APT (for Ubuntu and Debian-based distros), the Arch User Repository (AUR), and, of course, Flatpak.