SUMMARY Dolphin cannot find hidden files, because Baloo is not indexing them. According to the second bug, this is by design (although I disagree here, also in windows - where are even more inexperienced users - hidden files show in search results if they are shown in Explorer). Solution could be to make Baloo only index hidden files & folders, when those are actually shown in Dolphin. Independent from that, Dolphin should also search when Baloo is deactivated and maybe show a notification "search can be slow, because the indexing service is disabled". Dolphin doesn't show windows hidden files (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=184462) Baloo unable to find files in hidden folders (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=391252) STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Open Dolphin 2. Press CTRL+F 3. Search for "plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc" OBSERVED RESULT No results. EXPECTED RESULT File is found. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Linux/KDE Plasma: Kubuntu KDE Plasma Version: 5.13.5 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.50.0 Qt Version: 5.11.1 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Looks like you found the existing bug (Bug 391252) that was tracking this request. You might have notices that it was closed as RESOLVED INTENTIONAL. I'm afraid that's still the case: Baloo is not intended to be used for searching through hidden dotfiles; it's supposed to be used for user files. It is likewise not technically feasible to have Baloo temporarily index hidden files only when visible in Dolphin. Various people have expressed interest in a non-Baloo file search feature, which is tracked with Bug 391677. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 391677 ***
since 2020 , systemsettings "Search" has: "index hidden files and folders" i.e. those .files or dotfiles so new, its not even yet translated everywhere.