Trouble with Dolphin-Search

[Tony_Advantaged]

The search in dolphin have a strange behavior:

• Sometimes say that he cannot find some files on /-directory,
• sometimes say that cannot search at all,
• sometimes can search for a week without to find any /etc/fstab &
• sometime works if started in konsole.

Totally the search don’t works at all & dolphin even don’t tell what is going on internally by himself.

So, either make it to work or let tell us what he don’t like in order to remedy the problem. Like it’s now, works like a Redmond-Application.

Maybe recode it from scratch? Or tell us how to start it in “debug-modes”.
This situation begun by coming out of systemd & still not-predictable by each installation, even the flagship NEON & KUBUNTU have this “problem”.

Can you address us a wiki-page (please not “arch-wiki”) that explain us step-by-step where to watch & what we can do in case of errors or malfunctions?

Thanks in advance for your kind efforts.

[Thijxx]

I have noticed the same behavior on multiple machines and installations for the past few years. I always use mlocate on the command line because search in Dolphin never just works.

Did you find out anything about this in the meantime?

[medin]

From my experience as an average user of KDE desktop for 4 years, I can tell you that search in Dolphin is simply broken, there’s some algorithm which first uses indexing from that *** called baloo, and even if you disable baloo that alternate search has many serious problems, I gave up on Dolphin search for long time and simply use KFind.

[Thijxx]

Thank you, I did not know I had KFind, it works great!

[felixernst]

There is a very promising change to the default Dolphin search underway, however its author didn’t work on it in six weeks. I hope they will continue soon. (I don’t link to the work from here because I don’t want to put public pressure on them.)

Aside from that there were also already discussions about how to improve the default Dolphin search UI.

We are aware that the Dolphin search is unreliable from a user standpoint. All work on this is done by volunteers in their free time, so we have no idea how long it will take until the Dolphin search is in a state that can be considered good. We need more developer efforts for this work specifically.

[frc_kde]

I have been using Dolphin’s CTRL+F for 10+ years, now, and it have always worked fine, here.

I don’t use baloo indexing. – I don’t install baloo (except for baloo-widget), and I don’t install any akonadi – and if they come withing some distro, I remove them.

Dolphin’s CTRL+F finds any thing within my 1 TB devices in a few seconds, by file name – and a few more time within file contents.

For some advanced search – e.g., filtering by date, owner, permissions – I use KFind.

But “/” root filesystem does not belong to my user, so Dolphin has not full access to read all things – and there are many links from some point to other files, and it may be a problem, too.

If I need to locate something within system files, I feel better using some commands, e.g.:

$ whereis fstab
fstab: /etc/fstab /usr/share/man/man5/fstab.5.gz

With privileges (su or sudo), commands may find anything in mili-seconds, and edit.

Midnight-commander (mc) with root / admin privileges is the best way to browse, view, move, rename system files and folders – and you may choose to use the internal mcedit, or nano, or vi / vim (if installed).

[dzon]

I use Catfish. For the simple reason it’s about as fast as Dolphin search and it does a better job at finding content. I used to use pdf find and the likes scripts for better content search, but why bother. Unless I’m missing something to get this pdf content function to work in Dolphin, Catfish is the all-in-one for me personally.

Made a kdialog servicemenu for it.

[Tony_Advantaged]

Strange is that in some Distros works the Dolphin-Search flawlessly, e.g. Arcolinux-D. Bluestar-Linux, CachyOS, i don’t want tell more about, because each time i present a solution… the developer take down these options. Even the Dolphins-Addons are dropped down.

What ones was a flagship… Konqueror, Dolphin, Krusader… have even been abolished or not properly practicable anymore.

For my taste, the developers should more concentrate the efforts on making the “old” flagships again navigable or making them all better.

[trnqullea]

@Tony_Advantaged

Sometimes say that he cannot find some files on /-directory,

If you are searching from root, you are using Dolphin’s in-built search (filenamesearch), you do need to make sure you are searching for filenames (rather than content). Searching for “Content” from root will take ages…

Note that if you are searching for Content, filenamesearch does not give you matches if it finds the terms in the filename. I think that is not what people expect…

[cipricus]

In Kubuntu 24.04 Dolphin search finds absolutely nothing on a non-system partition (while baloo seems fine - with search in the app launcher or krunner), but finds in home. I also use Catfish:

With context menu, creating this service menu file catfish.desktop in ~/.local/share/kservices5/ServiceMenus:

[Desktop Action catfish]
Exec=catfish %u
Icon=org.xfce.catfish
Name=Search ~ with Catfish

[Desktop Entry]
Actions=catfish
Icon=org.xfce.catfish
MimeType=inode/directory;
ServiceTypes=KonqPopupMenu/Plugin
Type=Service
X-KDE-Priority=TopLevel

I also use a custom shortcut (in x11) after copying the location of a folder (a button for that can be added to Dolphin taskbar). The command is catfish --path "$(xclip -o)" and the shortcut is Meta-Alt-F.

[dzon]

Well, unlike on kubuntu where it hardly worked ( content was a no go in the last two kubuntus I used), search works nearly flawless on this one. It does most of what I need it for. So,…most. In a " what was the name of that file again, …ony …something?" scenario, for example, it doesn’t. Strings and parts is where it fails and Catfish doesn’t.

[letsdiskuss]

I thought I was going insane. Dolphin search works decently when file indexing is enabled (even though Baloo is not installed on my system, so I don’t know what indexer it’s using). When file indexing is disabled it doesn’t find subfolders nor files, but it sometimes finds file contents. KFind is not much better. Catfish works great, as does Thunar file search. I don’t know if I should ditch Dolphin for Thunar at this point, I use the search function a lot.

[dzon]

Why would you use thunar. A catfish search opens catfish anyway. Don’t get me wrong, file search works very good in thunar but it has its limits. Catfish hasn’t. For example, text within text files or pdf.