Search flexibility
It’s a file manager’s make or break feature.
The two sides to a coin metaphor perfectly describes the everincreasing disk space sizes. On the one hand high-capacity disks make it possible to retain files on your system rather than relegating them to a DVD backup. The downside is that you often have to wade through a large number of directories when searching for a file. This makes knowing your file manager’s search capabilities so important. Dolphin relies on Baloo, the file indexing and search framework for KDE Plasma to handle all search queries. This means that you must let Baloo keep an active index of all the files on your system. If you don’t, the search will return zero results even when you know a particular file definitely exists on disk. Apart from wildcards, you can also search for files based on type, such as audio or document, and narrow the results based on rating.
With GnomeFiles, you can restrict search to files based on type. Apart from PDF, picture, spreadsheet, presentation, video and other types, the tool also enables you to select from an exhaustive alphabetised list of formats. You can also define the last modified or last used date. For searching within the current directory, the tool also supports pattern matching. This means that you can search for files using patterns which describe the file name, such as *trip*. png which will select all png files within the current directory that have the work trip anywhere in the filename.
Search on SpaceFM is relegated to a separate window which you can access by clicking File>File Search. Although it supports a lot of pattern matching variables discussed in the manual, the search is flaky and unpredictable – it works sometimes, but not always.
XFE can search within hidden files. You can also restrict the search based on size, type or the last modified date. You can even search for files using the permissions: for example, you can limit the search to all files created by the linuxlala user and last modified before 60 days with the permission 0644. You can also specify if you’re looking for a folder, file, socket, link or pipe. The search can also be recursive and you can set the tool to follow symbolic links.