BigSearch

Desktop search for Linux that finds files by name and by content, keeps its index current as files change, and stays out of the way on old hardware.

BigSearch runs as a user service. It needs no root, watches the folders you can see (hidden files and anything a .gitignore excludes are skipped) and answers queries over a Unix socket. The index is Tantivy; the bookkeeping around it is SQLite.

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Status: pre-release. The socket protocol, the configuration file and the on-disk format may still change between versions.

Features

• Names: case-insensitive substring search over the full path, filtered by folder and extension from the CLI, and by media type through the socket.
• Content: plain text, Markdown, source code, PDF (through pdftotext) and OpenDocument / Office Open XML documents. Chinese, Japanese, Korean and South-East Asian scripts are indexed as overlapping bigrams, so they are searchable without a dictionary.
• Live index: inotify on every visible folder, so a saved file is searchable within seconds. After a restart only what changed while the service was down is read again.
• Earlier versions: on filesystems with reflinks (Btrfs, XFS) a copy of a document is kept before each save, within a disk budget.
• Origin: where a file came from — a browser download, a copy, a move — when that is known.
• Light on the machine: extraction runs at idle priority and paces itself by CPU load, I/O and memory pressure and whether the laptop is on battery. An idle daemon sleeps until a file changes.

Requirements

• Linux with inotify, and systemd for the user service.
• Rust 1.98.1; with rustup, rust-toolchain.toml selects it.
• SQLite 3, and poppler (pdftotext) for PDF content.
• For the settings page only: GTK 4.22 and libadwaita 1.9.

Build and install

cargo build --release
install -Dm755 target/release/big-search ~/.local/bin/big-search
install -Dm644 apps/big-search/packaging/big-search.service \
    ~/.config/systemd/user/big-search.service
systemctl --user enable --now big-search.service

The unit is hardened: ProtectSystem=strict, ProtectHome=read-only with a writable data directory, RestrictAddressFamilies=AF_UNIX and a syscall filter. On Arch-based systems, apps/big-search/packaging/arch builds a package instead.

Usage

big-search contract                     # file names
big-search content invoice 2026         # file contents
big-search both report -n 20            # both, without duplicates
big-search contract --ext pdf --under ~/Documents

big-search status                       # what the daemon is doing
big-search pause | resume | rebuild
big-search versions ~/notes/todo.md     # earlier versions kept of a file
big-search origin ~/Downloads/file.zip  # where a file came from

Queries go to the daemon when it is running and read the index directly otherwise. big-search --help lists every command. Output is colored on a terminal; --color never, NO_COLOR and CLICOLOR are honored.

Configuration

~/.config/big-search/config.toml is written on first run with every key documented. With no [[source]] block, the home folder is indexed. The CLI covers the common changes:

big-search config show
big-search config preset low-memory     # names-only | low-memory | balanced | complete
big-search config set extract-max-mb 16

Extra exclusions go in ~/.config/big-search/ignore, in gitignore syntax. A ! line brings back something the built-in rules skip (node_modules/, target/, minified files and the like).

The indexes and state live in ~/.local/share/big-search/; the socket is $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/biglinux/indexd.sock, mode 0600.

Repository layout

Path	Contents
apps/big-search	The daemon and the CLI. DESIGN.md covers the architecture and the measurements behind it.
crates/foundation/big-indexd-client	Socket protocol types and a small client for other programs.
crates/foundation/big-search-config	Reads and writes config.toml without losing the user's comments.
crates/ui/generic/big-search-settings	The GTK settings page other programs embed.

cargo build compiles only the daemon; add --workspace for the settings page.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md. Report security issues as described in SECURITY.md.

License

MIT. See LICENSE. scripts/third-party-notices.py writes the licenses of the crates compiled into the binary, for anyone redistributing it; the Arch package installs them next to LICENSE.