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Having switched to Linux Mint as my primary OS, one of the few things that makes me miss Windows are the built-in search capabilities.
In Windows, I can simply hit the "super" key and immediately enter search terms in the start menu. The search results may include the names of many PDFs, spreadsheets, text files, etc., if I have told Windows to index these files. Note that the search includes the text inside the files. If I want a little more information, a few intuitive keystrokes will get me to a file explorer with a longer list of filenames, including full paths and a few matches in context. From there I can, again very intuitively, refine my search with different keywords or by searching specific folders only. Overall, Windows does most of what I want here, and more or less out of the box.
Is it possible to achieve this kind functionality in Linux with existing tools? My impression is that it is not. Google Desktop is dead, other tools either don't index or only look at file names, etc... but any contrary suggestions are welcome.
These days I am using Synapse rather than Launchy. It's not as buggy as Launchy, but it similarly lacks the ability to search the text inside the files. – Brian Z – 2014-12-14T15:38:39.390