I use recoll[1] as my main homedir index/search tool. It supports many document formats and digs recursively into archives. It has a no-nonsense GUI, and a si

I use recoll[1] as my main homedir index/search tool. It supports many document formats and digs recursively into archives. It has a no-nonsense GUI, and a simple CLI interface. The search syntax is easy and flexible, allowing searches by many kinds of metadata, in addition to simple full-text search. It's slow with my collection of ~2.8 million files and the index on spinning rust, but it's thorough and reliable. For email, I store everything in mboxes, and index/search with Mairix[2]. It's wickedly fast and the search capabilities make gmail blush. I use a little script to search: if mairix -o $$ $*; then mutt -e 'set quit=yes' -f ~/Mail/$$ fi rm ~/Mail/$$ It's very common that I want to find an email from sometime in the last month, so my most common search is something like: search d:1m- alice And I'll have an instant view of all emails from alice in the last month. [1] https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/ [2] https://github.com/rc0/mairix