Recoll is free/open source (GPL) that can index PDFs and search them very quickly. It uses Xapian under the hood. I have over 165,000 documents indexed on an old laptop running Linux and can query them all in a split second. Source: 9 months ago

+ xapian which has been around a while, and while gpl licensed, is quite capable https://xapian.org/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago

Tangentially related if you need search without the clustering and high availability story of elastic search and friends I highly recommend Xapian. Its like the SQLite of search. Single library that provides the basic set of features you would expect in a quality search experience: facets, ranked search, boolean operators, stemming etc etc. https://xapian.org/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago

For fast searching, it usually requires indexing the files in question. There are a number of text-file indexing solutions, many of which use xapian, sphinx, or lucene/solr under the hood. Based on conditions (watching files/directories, cron jobs, new-mail triggers, etc), they'll add/remove files to the index, and you can then use a corresponding command to compose queries across that data. If it's indexed, it... Source: over 2 years ago

There is also xapian/recoll https://xapian.org/ which works great for "desktop" search. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago

And, albert https://albertlauncher.github.io/ would be the default spotlight alternative, but in my experience it's not that snappy and doesn't behave exactly as you'd expect. Imo the default gnome search function is fine. Source: about 1 year ago

It took quite some time, but after years of overhaul, testing, and patching I'd like to introduce Albert. New features (since 0.18) include an abstract plugin system, custom triggers, an API which got more developer friendly and of course feature rich for both C++ and Python plugins, plugins come with more features, search is even faster, UI is nicer, Qt6, C++20… Give it a try and let me know what you think. Source: over 1 year ago

Https://albertlauncher.github.io/ The demonstrations there confirm searching, and way more than I can do justice here. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago

Check out albert. They do it prefectly. https://albertlauncher.github.io/. Source: almost 2 years ago

> switched away from macOS To Linux by any chance? See https://albertlauncher.github.io. - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago