Interesting that nobody seems to talk about the software itself and maybe it's alternatives.
I for once welcome the concept of something like Finda and am looking for alternatives for me.
> Finda finds things — windows, browser tabs, code editor buffers, browser history, apps, files, etc.
Finda looks and acts like a normal launcher. The concept isn't new, but fast good launchers are rare. When we look at the Finda-Page (I didn't download the demo since I don't use Mac OS) we can conjecture how it works and there are a few things that bother me.
It seems to always run in the background and listen for inputs.
It's cross platform so it will probably have it's own file indexer.
This all seems to add up to a rather large memory consumption.
Anyway right now I'm still using the dmenu [1] launcher and am looking at many alternatives, most of which haven't been updated in some time.
First the ones that haven't been updated in some time
dmenu2 [2], interrobang [3], and lighthouse [4].
All nice launcher, but here comes my current favourite rofi [5]. Not only is it an active project, but it defines itself as window switcher and launcher (so what finda kinda does). Combined with it's extendable nature it seems to be a solid launcher. Bookmark functionality is for instance given with the buku [6] integration. But I'm still looking for the best solution. Here is the feature list I'm looking for: program launcher, simple calculator (through bc or python), file locator (maybe through locate), bookmark manager (firefox preferably). Other things like quick (online) search, clipboard management or the whole slew of other features provided Finda and panther and whatnot would just be extra. Does anyone of you have a nice lightweight solution?
Author here, and happy that you're interested in the software itself rather than the implementation =)
I'll probably write a detailed post about file indexing, since it's pretty interesting from a technical standpoint.
I looked into spotlight (via `mdfind`) but it was too slow and I wanted to port to Windows/Linux later, so your speculation is correct: Finda has its own file walking and indexing mechanism.
It walks a user-configurable set of directories, but not in the background --- it's actually done every time you open Finda, so you only pay the CPU cost when you are actually using the program.
The index is stored in memory, and size is proportional to the number of files/folders walked.
However, Finda does respect .gitignore files, so you can exclude things you don't want to show up in the search results (or consume memory).
Hey thx for the detailed answer. Thought that it might work like this.
How hard would it be to replace the electron frontend with something else? I was thinking about replacing it with some of my solutions I already use, but with your rust backend.
I for once welcome the concept of something like Finda and am looking for alternatives for me.
> Finda finds things — windows, browser tabs, code editor buffers, browser history, apps, files, etc.
Finda looks and acts like a normal launcher. The concept isn't new, but fast good launchers are rare. When we look at the Finda-Page (I didn't download the demo since I don't use Mac OS) we can conjecture how it works and there are a few things that bother me.
It seems to always run in the background and listen for inputs. It's cross platform so it will probably have it's own file indexer.
This all seems to add up to a rather large memory consumption.
Anyway right now I'm still using the dmenu [1] launcher and am looking at many alternatives, most of which haven't been updated in some time.
First the ones that haven't been updated in some time
dmenu2 [2], interrobang [3], and lighthouse [4].
All nice launcher, but here comes my current favourite rofi [5]. Not only is it an active project, but it defines itself as window switcher and launcher (so what finda kinda does). Combined with it's extendable nature it seems to be a solid launcher. Bookmark functionality is for instance given with the buku [6] integration. But I'm still looking for the best solution. Here is the feature list I'm looking for: program launcher, simple calculator (through bc or python), file locator (maybe through locate), bookmark manager (firefox preferably). Other things like quick (online) search, clipboard management or the whole slew of other features provided Finda and panther and whatnot would just be extra. Does anyone of you have a nice lightweight solution?
[1] https://github.com/stilvoid/dmenu
[2] https://github.com/muff1nman/dmenu2
[3] https://github.com/TrilbyWhite/interrobang
[4] https://github.com/emgram769/lighthouse
[5] https://github.com/DaveDavenport/rofi
[6] https://github.com/jarun/Buku/
- bl