Improving the Search of Nautilus

This summer I’m really glad to be working again on Nautilus as part of Google Summer of Code. This time, the goal of the project is to improve the Search. Currently, it misses some features that would make searching easier and there are also some performance issues.

So far I worked on Full Text Search. This could be done until now, but from Desktop Search (tracker-needle). Since one of the main functions of Nautilus is searching files, it makes sense for it to include this feature.

Now, if the user chooses so, the search results will no longer include only matches with the file name, but also with the contents of the file. Also, to be more relevant, a short snippet with the context in which the text was found is offered. To get this information, a Tracker query is used, which means that in order to find the files, they will need to be indexed by Tracker.

Until last week I was busy with my exams and those took quite a bit of my time, but now that they’re finally done, I can give my full attention to Nautilus.

Next, I’ll focus on tags, since this is a feature that would sure come in handy at organizing files. So, there are more updates to come in the following weeks 🙂