What's an alternative to "Everything" search for Linux?

Question

In windows there is a pretty good search tool named Everything, which can let us search files by name. It's very fast, and easy to use.

Now I wonder if there is any similar tool in Linux? Command line or GUI are both fine, but the most important thing is fast.

Answer 1

If you're just looking for file names, locate is pretty standard on Linux systems, although your distro might not have it installed by default.

$ locate vmlinuz
/vmlinuz
/vmlinuz.old
/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.35-28-generic
/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.35-30-generic

locate relies on a database of existing files which is normally updated nightly by a cron job, so its results are more-or-less instant.

If you need up-to-the-second results, you can instead use find, but it will take a while because it goes through the filesystem reading and examining every file present.

$ find / -name \*vmlinuz\*

will eventually return the same results, plus many "permission denied" errors if you're not running it as root. Note that the first argument to find is the directory to look in (including subdirectories), so you can limit it to only a part of the filesystem to speed things up considerably if you have some idea of where the target file(s) might be.

Answer 2

UPDATE: I finally ended up very satisfied with Mate desktop with its build in Search Tool (mate-search-tool fork of gnome-search-tool) . It is called directly from mint-menu.To search on all drives I just had to set auto-mounting to drives and update values in the dconf - see help of search tool.

OLD: After trying Searchmonkey, Locator, locate the best so far is Launchy . It is instantly fast with maybe too kompact UI

Answer 3

I have just released a UI front-end for "locate":

https://github.com/AlexTuduran/Locator/releases

Hope that helps.