QuickSearch

A fast local file indexer and search tool. QuickSearch walks your chosen folders into a compact SQLite index (FTS5 full-text + zstd-compressed text sidecar), keeps it fresh automatically with filesystem watchers and periodic reindexing, and serves ranked search-as-you-type results in a compact egui desktop app, or straight to your terminal.

Build & run

./build.sh          # Linux
build.bat           # Windows

These take a fresh machine all the way to a running app: install whatever build dependencies are missing, build release, then launch the GUI. Each setup stage is skipped when what it provides is already there, so a normal run costs one cargo build. build.sh installs Linux system packages with the distribution's package manager via sudo (apt/dnf/pacman/zypper) and the Rust toolchain with rustup; build.bat uses winget and rustup. Both take --check to report dependency status without installing or building, --no-run to stop after the build, and -- to pass the rest to the binary.

Building by hand needs a Rust toolchain (edition 2021) plus, on every platform, a C toolchain and Perl: SQLCipher, zstd and OpenSSL are compiled from bundled C sources, and OpenSSL's Configure is a Perl script. The old WebKit/WebView dependencies (setup.sh) are gone; the GUI renders with OpenGL via egui.

• Linux: working OpenGL 3.3 drivers; xdg-desktop-portal (present on all mainstream desktops) provides the native folder picker. On minimal images you may need build-essential perl pkg-config. No X11, Wayland or xkbcommon -dev packages are needed: winit dlopens the display stack at run time, so only the runtime libraries matter.
• Windows: Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools with the "Desktop development with C++" workload (MSVC v143 plus a Windows SDK), and Perl (Strawberry Perl); NASM is optional and only enables OpenSSL's assembly paths. For the GNU target instead, rustup target add x86_64-pc-windows-gnu and a mingw-w64 toolchain. Note that Windows ships only a software OpenGL 1.1 driver, so a bare VM or an RDP session without a vendor GPU driver cannot create a context and the window will fail to open.
• macOS: Xcode command line tools (build.sh does not auto-install these — only Linux package managers are handled).

cargo build --release -p quicksearch-gui   # binaries: target/release/quicksearch{,-cli}
cargo run -p quicksearch-gui               # or just run it
cargo test -p quicksearch-core             # backend test suite

Two binaries are produced. quicksearch is the desktop app; on Windows it is built as a window-subsystem app so no console appears behind it. quicksearch-cli is terminal search — a console app, so pipes, redirection and exit codes behave normally. On Unix quicksearch also does both, and quicksearch-cli is simply the same tool under a clearer name.

Install (Debian / Ubuntu)

./packaging/build-deb.sh
sudo apt install ./dist/quicksearch_0.1.0-1_amd64.deb

The script builds the release binary, strips it, and assembles a .deb with dpkg-deb. It needs no cargo-deb, no debhelper and no SVG rasteriser — only dpkg-deb and desktop-file-utils, both standard on Debian and Ubuntu. Useful flags: --no-build to package a binary you already built, --no-strip to keep debug symbols, -o DIR to write elsewhere. DEB_REVISION and DEB_MAINTAINER override the packaging revision and maintainer.

The package installs:

Path	Contents
/usr/bin/quicksearch	the desktop app, which also does terminal search
/usr/bin/quicksearch-cli	terminal search only
/usr/share/applications/quicksearch.desktop	menu entry, so QuickSearch appears in the app launcher
/usr/share/icons/hicolor/{16,22,24,32,48,64,128,256}x*/apps/	icons at each size
/usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/quicksearch.svg	the source icon
/usr/share/man/man1/quicksearch{,-cli}.1.gz	man quicksearch; the -cli page is a .so stub pointing at it
/usr/share/doc/quicksearch/	copyright, changelog, README, config_example.toml

Installing registers the menu entry and the icon: dpkg triggers owned by desktop-file-utils and hicolor-icon-theme refresh both caches, so no maintainer scripts are involved and apt remove reverses it cleanly.

No config.toml is installed. One placed next to the executable would put every user into portable mode (see Configuration); instead the app writes ~/.config/quicksearch/config.toml on first run.

Icons

crates/quicksearch-gui/assets/icons/ holds quicksearch_icon.svg and the PNGs rasterised from it. The PNGs are committed rather than generated, so an ordinary cargo build needs no image tooling — the 256px one is compiled into the binary with include_bytes! and becomes the window icon. Editing the SVG means re-rendering the PNGs; packaging/build-deb.sh documents how in a comment at the top.

X11 takes the window icon from the embedded PNG. Wayland ignores it and matches the app id (quicksearch) against the installed quicksearch.desktop, so under Wayland the titlebar icon appears only once the package is installed.

Usage

GUI

quicksearch with no query arguments opens the app:

• Search: results appear as you type; every keystroke cancels the previous search. One checkbox enables the two fuzzy passes. Sort by rank, name, path, size, or modified. Double-click a result to open it; right-click it to reveal it in the file manager, open it, copy its path, or build an ignore filter from it (session-only by default, optionally persisted to the config). Result text can be selected and copied in place. Matches in file contents show highlighted snippets.
• Manage Index: full indexing status, Start/Stop/Automatic controls, indexed folder list, full-text extension filters, ignore patterns, and the indexing options.
• Duplicates: files sharing a content hash, grouped.
• Logs: the lines the app would have printed to a terminal — warnings from indexing, folder watching and opening files, newest last, with a filter box and Copy button. Launched from a desktop launcher (or on Windows, where the app has no console at all) this is the only place they are visible.
• Help: an in-app quickstart — first indexing run, example queries, what each tab does — pointing here for everything technical.

The bottom status bar always shows what the indexer is doing (phase, percent, files/sec) or the total indexed file count when idle.

Terminal

quicksearch report type:Document modified:">=2024-01-01"
quicksearch --long --limit 20 "quarterly budget"
quicksearch --fuzzy repot          # tolerates typos

Prints rank-ordered paths (pipe-friendly); --long adds rank, size, mtime, and highlighted snippets. quicksearch --help shows all flags.

On Windows use quicksearch-cli for all of the above — quicksearch.exe opens the app, and any query given to it seeds the search box instead of printing. Colour in --long output needs a console with virtual-terminal processing; Windows Terminal has it, and older consoles get plain text.

Password protection

The index contains the names and (by default) the full text of everything it indexes — for most setups, your entire home directory. That is a lot of concentrated risk in one file. Options → Security → Enable password protection encrypts the index on disk with SQLCipher; from then on QuickSearch asks for the password every time it starts, in the GUI (an unlock screen before anything opens the index) and in the terminal (a hidden prompt). Enabling, disabling, or changing the password deletes and rebuilds the index — there is no in-place conversion.

• The key is derived as Argon2id(password, salt); the salt is written to config.toml when the password is set (it is unique, not secret, and required — keep it with the config if you copy a protected setup).
• Remember on this device stores the derived key (never the password) in the OS keychain — Secret Service/KWallet on Linux, Credential Manager on Windows — and skips the prompt. Without a keychain daemon the option quietly falls back to prompting.
• Scripts can set QUICKSEARCH_PASSWORD for non-interactive terminal search. Environment variables are readable by other processes of the same user (/proc/<pid>/environ) — prefer the keychain.
• Forgot the password? The unlock screen can delete the index and disable protection; your files are untouched and re-indexing rebuilds it.

What this protects: the index file at rest — disk theft, backups, other accounts reading the file. What it does not protect: a compromised running session (the derived key is in process memory while the app runs), and the files themselves, which are exactly as readable as before. A wrong password can never wipe the index; it is refused without touching the file.

Query syntax

This section is the complete reference (the in-app "?" popup shows a condensed version of the same rules). Everything that isn't a filter is matched as one phrase, in order. Filters combine freely with the search text:

Syntax	Meaning
budget report	names, contents, and paths containing the phrase budget report
"exact phrase"	quotes keep spaces, stars, and filter-like words literal; "" escapes a quote
bud*port	* matches any run of characters (it stays on one line of content); % and _ are always literal
`regex:"(foo	bar)\d+"`
type:Audio	one of Audio, Image, Video, Document, Text, Archive, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Folder
modified:>=2024-01-01	also <, <=, >, = (dates are yyyy-mm-dd; mtime: is an alias)
path:/home/me/docs	restrict to a folder and its subfolders (folder: and includefolder: are aliases); * is literal here
path:C:\Users\me\docs	the same on Windows — drive letters and backslashes need no quoting
mime:application/pdf	exact MIME type
name:re*.txt	filename contains (as a filter, unranked; filename: is an alias); unquoted * globs

Unrecognized key:value text (like 12:30) stays part of the search phrase, and a half-typed quote never errors while you type. AND, OR and parentheses are treated as plain words. A term of only stars matches nothing, and a regex that could match the empty string is rejected rather than matching every file. regex: bypasses the trigram index entirely and combines with filters; alongside search text it acts as an extra requirement on those results.

The search box highlights this syntax as you type: recognized filter keywords in red, their arguments in blue, syntax characters (operators, quotes, live wildcards) in green, on a tinted chip per complete filter. An argument the engine would reject — unknown type: name, bad date, invalid regex — switches to the error color immediately.

Results are ranked: exact filename matches (case-sensitive first), then filename substrings, then full-text matches ordered by occurrence count, then fuzzy filename/full-text matches when enabled, and last the files matched somewhere else in their path. Later, weaker matches only ever append to the bottom of the list. Wildcard terms rank through the same tiers (an "exact" match means the whole name matches the pattern) but skip the fuzzy passes; regex-only queries reuse the substring, full-text, and path tiers. Path matching needs at least three characters, and terms may span separators (docs/report). Full-text matching also needs at least three characters of literal text (the trigram floor). The fuzzy passes tolerate typos with a budget of one edit per three characters, capped by [search] fuzzy_max_edits (default 2; 0 turns fuzzy off).

Configuration

config.toml lives at ~/.config/quicksearch/config.toml (Windows: %APPDATA%\quicksearch\config.toml) and is created on first run; the default index goes to ~/.local/share/quicksearch/index.sqlite (Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\quicksearch\index.sqlite). See config_example.toml for every option.

Defaults follow the platform. The first indexing root is your home directory or %USERPROFILE%; include_hidden = false skips dot-files everywhere and additionally anything marked Hidden or System on Windows, which is what keeps AppData, $RECYCLE.BIN and System Volume Information out of the index; and ignore patterns are matched case-insensitively on Windows and macOS, matching the filesystem.

Portable mode: a config.toml sitting next to the quicksearch binary overrides the user config entirely, and relative paths inside any config resolve against the config file's own directory, so a folder containing the binary, its config, and its index can be moved wholesale.

The GUI edits the config live; external edits apply on next start.

Engineering overview

Two crates:

crates/quicksearch-core   library: indexing, storage, search
crates/quicksearch-gui    binary "quicksearch": egui app + terminal mode

Backend (quicksearch-core)

Synchronous Rust: std::thread + mpsc channels, no async runtime.

• Storage (db/): SQLite via rusqlite (bundled SQLCipher build — identical to stock SQLite until a key is applied), WAL mode so the single writer never blocks streaming read-only searches. files holds metadata (name, path, size, mtime, hash, MIME/type bitmask, per-row index state); searchabletext is a contentless FTS5 table (postings only, configurable tokenizer, trigram by default); canonical extracted text lives zstd-compressed in documents_text, which powers snippets, occurrence ranking, and fuzzy full-text search. Schema changes wipe and rebuild by policy; the indexer (open_or_recreate) is the only code allowed to do that; every consumer uses open_existing, which treats drift as an error, never data loss. With password protection on, every open applies the Argon2id-derived raw key (security.rs, process-global in db/key.rs) before anything reads the file; a wrong key is a tagged KEY_MISMATCH error, structurally distinct from the schema drift that may wipe, so it can never destroy an intact index.
• Indexing (indexing.rs, file_handling.rs): full runs walk each root (filtered_walk prunes hidden/ignored subtrees before descending), classify files by mtime into insert/update/skip, batch-write metadata, sweep stale rows, then extract content (plaintext, Office, PDF, audio tags, EXIF; see extract/) for FTS. Files no larger than processing.hash_length skip that second pass entirely: the head the walk reads to hash them is already their whole content, so a plaintext body is extracted in the same read and stored complete. Progress streams through a polled IndexingStatus.
• Coordinator (coordinator.rs): the object binaries construct. Owns the IndexingService, the debouncing filesystem watcher (watcher.rs), and the mode state machine (Auto / Manual). Watcher events become single-file transactions (incremental.rs) that keep files, FTS, and the text sidecar consistent per commit; a full reindex runs on a configurable interval. Incremental writes defer while a full run is active, so there is exactly one writer at a time. Registration follows what the platform's notification API can do: inotify covers one directory per watch, so the roots are walked and each surviving directory registered individually (skipping .git, node_modules and hidden subtrees, which is what keeps the watch count affordable), while ReadDirectoryChangesW covers a whole tree from one handle and takes a single watch per root, filtering the events instead. Either way a tree too large to watch degrades to periodic reindexing rather than going silently stale.
• Search (search/): SearchService runs one worker thread; each query is a generation. New queries interrupt the in-flight SQLite statement (InterruptHandle) and stale generations stop cooperatively, so typing never waits. The cascade streams rank-ordered batches: one files scan classifies exact/case/substring filename matches (ranks 1–4) and, since a path contains its own name, sets aside full-path matches from the same rows (ranks 9–10); one FTS phrase probe verified against the decompressed text yields full-text ranks 5–6 ordered by occurrence count; and the opt-in fuzzy passes run a bitap (Wu–Manber) matcher over filenames (rank 7), document text (rank 8) and paths (rank 11), with a configurable edit budget. The deferred path tiers flush last, so weaker matches only ever append. All SQL is parameterized; structured filters from the query language (query/) are ANDed onto every pass.
• Baloo compatibility (cli.rs, mime.rs): read-only endpoints (status_for_path, list_failed, index_size_breakdown, …) and a Baloo-shaped type model, groundwork for a future balooctl-compatible layer.
• Logging (log.rs): background reporting goes through log_info! / log_warn! rather than println!/eprintln!. Each writes its line to stderr and appends it to a bounded in-memory ring (newest 5000 lines, with a count of what was dropped) that the GUI's Logs tab reads, so a windowed run with no terminal still surfaces them. Command output — search hits, usage, the error a command exits with — stays on stdio.
• Platform differences (platform.rs): the single home for #[cfg]. Home directory lookup, what counts as a hidden entry (dot-prefix, plus the Hidden/System attributes on Windows), network-filesystem detection (/proc/mounts against GetDriveTypeW), path collation, and the watch-registration strategy all live here, so the rest of the crate can ask a question rather than test a target. Anything decidable from a string alone is split out so its tests run on every platform.

Frontend (quicksearch-gui)

Immediate-mode egui/eframe app, one UI thread:

UI thread ──SearchRequest──▶ search worker ──SearchUpdate (mpsc)──▶ drained per frame
UI thread ──commands──────▶ IndexCoordinator ──state──▶ polled per frame
core threads ─────────────▶ ctx.request_repaint() (wake the UI)

Modules map one-to-one onto what you see: app.rs (shell, status bar, config routing), search_tab.rs (query strip, virtualized results table, snippet highlighting via LayoutJob byte ranges, ignore dialog), manage_tab.rs (status detail + tracker.rs rate estimation, roots and filter editors), duplicates_tab.rs, logs_tab.rs (a virtualized view of the core log ring), options.rs (draft-based settings editor shared between the window and the Manage tab), platform.rs (open / reveal-in-file-manager, and the Windows stdio setup a window-subsystem process needs before anything prints), cli.rs (terminal mode, shared with the quicksearch-cli binary). There is no pagination: the table is virtualized, so a single scroll list capped at display_limit renders in microseconds regardless of row count.

Development

• cargo test -p quicksearch-core: unit + integration suites (cascade ranking, cancellation, incremental indexing, coordinator modes, config resolution, fuzzy matcher vs. brute-force oracle).
• cargo test -p quicksearch-gui: formatter/tracker/CLI-parsing units.
• QSB_SNIPPET_PERF=1 cargo test --release -p quicksearch-core --test snippet_perf -- --nocapture: snippet pipeline benchmark.
• New extractors: implement extract::Extractor and register it in Registry::default_set(). New cascade behavior: search/cascade.rs documents the rank invariants that keep streamed results append-only.