Comment 75 for bug 646724

Jakob

There is a trade-off between 'locate' and 'tracker'.

locate:
  + will actually find more files than other solutions, including files not in your home directory (and not owned by you)
  - Issue with encrypted home directory (?)
  - relies on a daemon which by default runs just once a day (though you could tweak this up yourself if needed)
  - searching can be slower

tracker:
  - will only find files in directories that it watches (a subset of places)
  - some worry about the background performance penalty running tracker imposes
  ++ can search on both filenames, their metadata content, and their real text content

Its that last ++ that is so attractive to me. I did actually get the prototype tracker lens of #71 compiled and running in 12.04 (does need mods to work with latest Unity API) and it works reasonably well.

Unfortunately I don't have the time myself to get it properly working and release worthy, but if someone could be persuaded to at least polish the current code it could then be installed along with Tracker for users who want it.

The next step would then be to write a combo tracker/zeitgeist lens that combines the search power of tracker with the relevancy of zeitgeist. Such a beast should be possible, and for those users who like to install Tracker would give them a top class search on their tracker-indexed directories.