As baloo itself is quite powerful but complex, maybe we can add a tutorial to it in KDE welcome program. As recently when I try to deal with baloo not indexing C source code, I find out that many people on reddit completely disable baloo because baloo doesn’t work as excepted due to misunderstanding and misconfiguration. What’s worse, some even claim baloo is the worst part of Dolphin. So adding an introduction to baloo in welcome page will help solve this problem a lot.
I’d say looking at the Documentation is a good idea, but I think Baloo would be a long way down the list of priorities for a fresh install…
This would be better, as ‘Welcome’ programs vary for distributions.
Manjaro-hello, for example, has links ‘Read Me’ advising people to ‘Search the Web’ and ‘Look in the Forums’.
After that, support is offered via Forums - and that’s where these questions should find answers.
Advice about how to configure Baloo to index C source code hasn’t cropped up in my experience since 2006.
File Search and Indexing is a worthy topic - but indexing C source code is fairly niche. At least now we’ll find an answer at 497360 – Baloo Unable to Index contents in C Source File
Yes. I know that. I’m not just talking about source file index, I’m talking about a more general user-experience.
Just look at this topic: Cannot properly use Baloo. You see, baloo doesn’t work for this guy as excepted and he finally decides to give up.
Also look at this guy in reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1bqjia9/is_this_normal_for_baloo/. Instead of reporting a bug to upstream, he or she also ends up disabling baloo which actually make baloo get into a vicious circle. I’m not blaming him, a regular user who doesn’t want to spend lots of time tinkering software makes sense.
So besides documents, should we provide a user-friendly interface like tips of the day in Kmymoney and libreoffice to “teach” them how to use baloo index and report bug correctly when something goes wrong if providing one in welcome program isn’t satisfied?
Due to multiple possible combination of Filesystem under Linux, baloo can just use a much more generic way to index file and maintain index database itself instead of relying on filesystem itself like what Everything does under Windows platform. So there might be lots of bugs behind it because of this kind of complexity.
The welcome screen is probably not the best place for something “complex”. There is ongoing work to redesign the Dolphin search box, and that would be a good place for Baloo help/info, i.e. exactly where it’s used.
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the whole file searching aspect of plasma is a daunting subject.
i agree it needs more love, but i don’t feel anything more than a passing mention in the welcome screen is needed.
coming from windows where “find” was a unitary and blunt instrument, i was blissfully unaware of the complexity and the options in this area.
perhaps what is need on the welcome screen is just a brief introduction to methods of file search and how indexing can help with a link to better baloo documentation.
I understand the problem.
One reason I always push folks to join proper forums is that they learn to create proper resources.
Pretend you have the same issue today, waddya do?
Go search the internet - you’ll find your answer… You cannot include all this stuff in the Welcome application - but you can link people to 1. Distribution forum 2. KDE Discuss for Plasma installs.
If just 2-3% of those people join and become slightly active, you have a really good resource more fluid than documentation.
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I must say, I didn’t quite give up on it as I realized I was a little bit unreasonable with it. Properly configured, it is alright, but some things are driving me insane about it that I have to verify it is searching properly using Nemo, whose search is perfectly instinctive. If they address those issues and it does indeed delete removed files from its index, it is an alright tool. On the other hand, it would be awesome if Dolphin extends its native search capabilities to include non-plain text files as well. This way, there would also be a very solid index-free search tool.
It does in the just released 24.12 version, if you also install ripgrep-all.
However, the search syntax is regexp, and it doesn’t match filenames and content at the same time, so we need some more work to make it intuitive.
Will ripgrep be incorporated eventually? I was once told that it should be this month.
I have manually installed it and I check with rga --version and it shows that it is installed.
After restarting, it is gone…