Managing search on the KDE desktop

The starting point her is just what packages is my setup using. openSUSE Leap 15.6 with KDE 5. Just what search indexing was being used was not immediately obvious and I was being told baloo, but in reality it is actually baloo5 which does seem to make a difference. The advice being provided by Mistral was basically rubbish, and even telling it the right functions it kept using the duff ones! I may have a look to see just where we are but I need to document here what does work, and copying the Mistral responses are of little use.

In addition to the base indexing that Dolphin should be using, I also loaded up Recoll while playing with things, and this produces it's own index. In some ways it is a lot tidier than search in Dolphin, so I suspect it will remain as a sort of 'advanced search', which is missing from Dolphin.

Now I need links to the various manuals ... and add them to my library so I can search them locally :)

Recoll has just thrown up another plus feature with an extension for Firefox. Not sure if this will replace my normal process of simply downloading a copy of pages that are interesting, and it has already indexed those in the current archive but it looks useful. The main manual has been downloaded as a pdf, but further material is available at the documentation site. However some of the supporting links are now dead ends, a problem I need to address on my own sites.

baloo is part of the core KDE development so has it's own repository on github but I'm playing with sightly older versions that are compatible with the Leap 15.6-1 packages. Actually it does look as if the latest version is running, it's just not listed on the packages library as available. The documentation on baloo is on the KDE community site which is probably about time I digested a little more. The one nice thing about this site is that it plays nicely with the high res monitor and is a lot more readable than many other documentation sites. Need to look into just how they do it to improve my own bitweaver framework sites. All that said, the material on baloo is marked as 'may be obsolite' and links to a limited amount of material in github. One article is interesting on using the Xapian database, this is interesting since Recoll is based on Xapian. Personally I might prefer both to be using Firebird, then I could access that material myself and include backup's in the over night housekeeping, but that is probably going a bit too far. The search in bitweaver is part of the Firebird database that contains all the site material, and another wish list item from 20 years ago is 'search pdf files on the site'. Something that may actually be available soon! Now while I can easily search email archives in thunderbird, can baloo achieve what Recoll does in indexing as one index. Thunderbird searches four separate areas at present.

I see that Leap 16.0Alpha is available, although I am seriously considering Tumbleweed since it just rolls the latest versions of everything. I have run it in the past when I had a separate development machine, but I think it's probably a better option today since much of the stuff I am already running is not directly supported by the Leap distribution.