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Daniel Struis edited this page Sep 16, 2026 · 3 revisions

Installation

Pre-built binaries are attached to every GitHub Release.

Windows

Installer (recommended) — download InSearch-<version>-x86_64.msi from the releases page and run it. It installs InSearch to C:\Program Files\InSearch, adds a Start-menu shortcut, and registers a clean Add/Remove Programs entry. The CLI (insearch-cli) is added to PATH.

Standalone — prefer no installer? Download InSearch.exe (the GUI) and/or insearch-cli.exe and run them from anywhere.

Requirements

  • Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit). No Visual C++ Redistributable needed — the binaries are self-contained.
  • No GPU required (from 0.7.0). The GUI renders through DirectX 12 and falls back to WARP, Windows' built-in CPU renderer, when there is no GPU — so it runs on virtual machines (Hyper-V, VMware, cloud VMs), Windows Sandbox, servers on the Basic Display Adapter, and RDP sessions without hardware acceleration. With a GPU it uses the GPU. ℹ About → Renderer shows which one is active.
  • Advanced: InSearch.exe --renderer glow uses the older OpenGL path; --software-gpu forces WARP even with a GPU (useful when a graphics driver misbehaves). Environment variables INSEARCH_RENDERER=glow|wgpu and INSEARCH_SOFTWARE_GPU=1 do the same.
  • Truly headless sessions (a service account, SSH without a desktop) have no window to draw into — use insearch-cli there.

winget — a manifest has been submitted to the community repository (pending moderator review). Once merged: winget install StruisICT.InSearch.

Enable the Explorer "Search with InSearch" entry

InSearch can add a right-click menu entry for files and folders. It's opt-in and per-user (no admin, HKCU):

  1. Run InSearch → ⚙ Settings → Explorer integration → Install entry.
  2. Right-click any file or folder (on Windows 11, under Show more options) → Search with InSearch.

The selected folder opens as the search root with the cursor already in the search box — just type. Remove it any time from the same Settings panel.

Linux

Download InSearch-linux-x86_64.tar.gz and extract it:

tar -xzf InSearch-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
./insearch-gui        # the GUI
./insearch-cli --help # the CLI

The GUI needs the usual desktop libraries (GTK, wayland/x11, OpenGL). A GPU is not required: Mesa's llvmpipe provides software OpenGL on practically every distro, so GPU-less Linux VMs with a desktop work too. On a headless box use insearch-cli.

Updating

Replace the binaries (or re-run the MSI) with a newer release. The MSI performs an in-place major upgrade, so settings and the context-menu registration are preserved.

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InSearch

Source on GitHub

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