GTK Frontend – Locate Tool for XFCE

gtklocatexfce

I am a heavy user of the locate tool, which is part of the findutils package. It's fine to use it on command line, but sometimes I would also like to search for a file (as fast as with locate) within my Xfce 4.10 desktop.

Is there any nice GTK frontend (or a panel applet) for the locate command?

Best Answer

The one that I'm most familiar with is called catfish. It's generally in most of the standard distros' repos. The main website is here, titled: Catfish is a versatile file searching tool.. The project's Launchpad site is another additional resource if needed.

excerpt from website

Catfish is a search GUI powered by locate and find behind the scenes, with autocompletion from Zeitgeist and locate. The advanced options allow filtering by date and file type. The interface is intentionally lightweight and simple, using only GTK+.

Example

Search

ss #1

Results

ss #2

Advanced filtering

ss #3

Related Solutions

Getting visual feedback of workspace switch in xfce

If you're so inclined, you can install pyxfce and somehow handle active_workspace_changed callback, e.g. by showing a notification via notify-send or aosd_cat. But this is, of course, a hack, and no, I didn't try it.

Bash – Quick way to open results from `find` or `locate`

I've had this in my ~/.screenrc for a while:

bind -c pasteline 1 eval copy 'stuff "-Y"' 'paste .'
bind -c pasteline 2 eval copy 'stuff "2-Y"' 'paste .'
bind -c pasteline 3 eval copy 'stuff "3-Y"' 'paste .'
bind -c pasteline 4 eval copy 'stuff "4-Y"' 'paste .'
bind -c pasteline 5 eval copy 'stuff "5-Y"' 'paste .'
bind -c pasteline 6 eval copy 'stuff "6-Y"' 'paste .'
bind -c pasteline 7 eval copy 'stuff "7-Y"' 'paste .'
bind -c pasteline 8 eval copy 'stuff "8-Y"' 'paste .'
bind -c pasteline 9 eval copy 'stuff "9-Y"' 'paste .'
bindkey ¬ command -c pasteline

Basically, typing ¬1 from within screen, inserts the first line above the cursor, ¬2 the second line and so on.

In my ~/.Xdefaults, I also have:

XTerm.VT100.translations:             #override\
    Meta <KeyPress> /: dabbrev-expand()

Which lets xterm complete (upon Alt+/) on what's on the screen (looking backward from the cursor position).

With zsh, when used within screen, you could do:

copy-screen() {
  screen -X eval copy 'stuff "-$ H\r"' 'writebuf .lastoutput'
  killring=(${(Oaf)"$(<~/.lastoutput)"})
  CUTBUFFER=$killring[1]
  killring[1]=()
}
zle -N copy-screen
bindkey '\ec' copy-screen

to bind Alt+C to that widget that stores the lines above the cursor into the cut buffer and the kill ring (what you paste with Ctrl+Y and cycle through with Alt+Y in emacs mode). (the above assumes screen was started from your home directory).

If the inserted text needs to be quoted (because it contains spaces or other special shell characters for instance), you can type Alt+" for zsh to quote it.

As an example, you've just run:

$ find /usr/local -size +1M
/usr/local/lib/liblzma.a
/usr/local/share/doc/sudo/ChangeLog
/usr/local/share/perl/5.18.2/Unicode/Unihan/Definition.db
/usr/local/share/perl/5.18.2/Unicode/Unihan/RSKangXi.db
/usr/local/share/perl/5.18.2/Unicode/Unihan/IRG_TSource.db
/usr/local/share/perl/5.18.2/Unicode/Unihan/HanYu.db
/usr/local/share/perl/5.18.2/Unicode/Unihan/RSUnicode.db
/usr/local/share/perl/5.18.2/Unicode/Unihan/IRG_GSource.db
/usr/local/share/perl/5.18.2/Unicode/Unihan/IRGKangXi.db
/usr/local/share/perl/5.18.2/Unicode/Unihan/IRGHanyuDaZidian.db

And you want to open vim on that sudo ChangeLog above. With the first approach you'd type:

vim ¬9

With the second approach:

vim /usAlt+/

And repeat that Alt+/ until you get to the changelog.

With the third approach:

vim Alt+CCtrl+YAlt+Y

And repeat that Alt+Y until you get to the changelog.

The last approach can be used for your $s1 query.

Instead of storing in the killring array, store in an array (like $s) and use $s[1] for the first line, $s[2] for the second...

copy-screen() {
  screen -X eval copy 'stuff "-$ H\r"' 'writebuf .lastoutput'
  s=(${(Oaf)"$(<~/.lastoutput)"})
}
zle -N copy-screen
bindkey '\ec' copy-screen

That Alt+C stores the lines above the cursor in the s array.

In any case, what we're retrieving is what is displayed on the screen, which is not necessarily the same as what the last command output. For instance printf 'a\bc \n' outputs 5 bytes a, BS, c, SPC and LF, but displays just a c.