I was investigating the behavior of Baloo and Dolphin when I noticed something curious. When searching for already indexed filed through Dolphin, the search is near instantaneous in my case. But for the non indexed filed, they don't even show up in the results. For comparison, I decided to deactivate the file indexer temporarily to see how Dolphin behaves. Now it takes a few seconds to search through the directories but it did find the files that weren't indexed. This thing with the indexing happens often when searching in places the file indexer didn't run, like removable drives or other partitions. As an experiment, I created a symlink on my home folder, which was indexed, to my steamapps folder, which is inside the .steam/root/ folder. It wasn't indexed, possibly because of the config for indexing hidden files being on "no". It also happens if the symlink is to a different partition on disk. For those cases, wouldn't it be better if the regular search is used instead of looking over the index file from Baloo? That way it doesn't show "No items matching the search". I assume it is one of the reasons many people think Baloo doesn't work. Could well put this in the 15-minute bug list if possible. I like how I can use tags for files and Baloo is necessary for that.
A possibly relevant merge request was started @ https://invent.kde.org/system/dolphin/-/merge_requests/642
Perhaps worth linking to a couple of summaries... (In reply to ryu.ketsueki from comment #0) > I was investigating the behavior of Baloo and Dolphin when I noticed > something curious. When searching for already indexed filed through Dolphin, > the search is near instantaneous in my case. But for the non indexed filed, > they don't even show up in the results. For comparison, I decided to > deactivate the file indexer temporarily to see how Dolphin behaves. Now it > takes a few seconds to search through the directories but it did find the > files that weren't indexed. Have a look at Bug 463830 - for a comparision of Dolphin's "filenamesearch" and "baloosearch" > ... As an > experiment, I created a symlink on my home folder, which was indexed, to my > steamapps folder, which is inside the .steam/root/ folder. It wasn't > indexed, possibly because of the config for indexing hidden files being on > "no". It also happens if the symlink is to a different partition on disk. > For those cases, wouldn't it be better if the regular search is used instead > of looking over the index file from Baloo? That way it doesn't show "No > items matching the search". I assume it is one of the reasons many people > think Baloo doesn't work ... Similarly Bug 447119 gives thepitfalls and confusions possible with symlinks > I like how I can use tags for files and Baloo is necessary for that. Indeed. Baloo gives Dolphin superpowers :-)