Flash Search 🔦

Flash is a full-text desktop search engine, designed to help users find their files. Using preprocessing techniques, flash creates an index, allowing searching without having to crawl the file system, substantially reducing search times.

Installation

Before flash can be installed, ensure that all dependencies are installed by running:

sudo apt install libmagic-dev

and

sudo apt install libgtk-3-dev libcairo2-dev libglib2.0-dev

Clone the repository:

git clone git@git.cs.sun.ac.za:20721900/flash.git

Move into the flash directory:

cd flash

Install the program:

go install

Finally, run the install command to set up flash on your system:

flash install

Congrats, you can now use flash! 🎉

Start by adding the directories you want indexed using

flash add <path-to-dir>

Once it has been indexed, the files can be searched by either using

flash find <search-query>

or

flash gui

Usage

Once flash has been installed it can be used as follows:

flash [command]

Command	Description	Usage
add	Adds a file or directory to the watch list	flash add <path-to-dir>
blacklist	Blacklists all files which match a given regex	flash blacklist [command]
daemon	Used to control the file monitor daemon	flash daemon [command]
find	Searches the index for a given phrase	flash find "<search-query>"
gui	Opens a graphical search box	flash gui
help	Outputs help for the program	flash help
install	Performs all setup required for flash to run	flash install
remove	Removes a file or directory from the watch list	flash remove <path-to dir>
reset	Removes all files from the index	flash reset

Development

To edit or build the code yourself, simply clone the repository as shown above. A binary can be built using:

go build main.go

Otherwise, the project can be built and run in a single command, using:

go run main.go [command]

Where [command] is one of the commands described above.

Authors

• Andrew Cullis - Stellenbosch University