November 5, 2020

Dreaming of personal google

I’d love to have a robust personal search engine, something like mac’s Spotlight, but actually functional. It should search all of my text files, saved webpages, pdfs, ebooks and photos.

Recoll is very good, but I still can’t manage to build it on macOS with the Python module enabled, which I need because I want to use the web ui, since the standard UI is QT-based, and QT apps look and feel disgusting on macOS, unfortunately.

Ripgrep is another alternative, as long as you don’t need to search inside of obscure data formats like pdfs and epubs. For that, rga is great, and it even caches results. However, it’s doesn’t index data, so it’s not instantaneous. Which is fine in most cases.

So, yeah, I’ll probably write a HTTP wrapper and a simple web GUI on top of rga, and see how to goes from there. No indexing is actually a good thing for consistency, so.


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Tantacrul is a wonderful youtube channel about music and music software. My favorite videos: Music Software & Bad Interface Design: Avid’s Sibelius