Nautilus’ file search makes it relatively easy to find any specific file or folder on your Linux system, but it’s not going to win any speed awards.

For faster Linux file search, with instant results as you type, take a look at the (superbly) named ANGRYsearch, a Python-based app.

It displays results as you type the name of the file/folder you are looking for

ANGRYsearch is heavily inspired by the Everything Search Engine app for Windows — just like Fsearch, a similar tool we’ve written about previously (Fsearch now has a daily builds PPA, btw).

“Everyone seems to be damn content with searches that are slow, populating results as they go; or are cli based, making it difficult to comfortably make use of the results; or are heavily integrated with a file manager, often limiting search to just home; or are trying to be everything with full-text file’s content search,” the project developer explains on Github.

Some skill, a pinch of python3 (and PyQt5 for the GUI) and copious amount of configuration capabilities later, the solution is ANGRYsearch.

ANGRYsearch

ANGRYsearch has 3 search modes

  • Fast – default; fastest, but no support for substrings
  • Slow – slightly slower, but can find substrings
  • Regex – slowest, used for very precise searches using regular expressions
angrysearch regex example
ANGRYsearch Regex Example

You can enable Regex mode by pressing F8.

You can choose whether the search database uses full mode or lite mode (default) by editing theangrysearch_lite variable in  ~/.config/angrysearch/angrysearch.conf:

  • Lite mode — faster, shows only name and path
  • Full mode — slower, shows name, path, size and last modified date

Install ANGRYsearch on Ubuntu

The app isn’t super easy to install on Ubuntu — but it’s not exactly difficult either.

First, install PyQt5. This dependency must be satisfied before you can install the app; ANGRYsearch won’t run without it:

sudo apt install python3-pyqt5

Next, download the latest release from the project’s Github page and, when complete, extract it:

Download ANGRYsearch from Github

Finally, cd inside the extracted folder, and use the following commands to run the install script:

chmod +x install.sh && sudo ./install.sh

Arch users among you can install it direct from AUR.