Comment by submeta

3 years ago

The full text search feature is surprisingly useful. Just searched my ~800 books for keywords like "tree traversal" or "assoc" to find books that I wouldn't have suspected to deal with these topics (`assoc` being a Lisp keyword searching for entries in association lists [1]).

And I already had ways to search within contents of my books via "HoudahSpot" (an excelent MacOS tool that uses Spotlight search to sift through all my files and present the results in a tabular view), or via command line using `mdfind` [2]

[1] https://jtra.cz/stuff/lisp/sclr/assoc.html

[2] For example searching all PDF files for a certain keyword:

     mdfind "kMDItemKind='*PDF*' && kMDItemTextContent='*tree-traversal*'" | grep -Ev "Mail|Library" | sort | less

I wonder how well it scales, I have a rather large collection and would love to use this. As long as the index is much smaller than the source files, and it doesn't search by re-reading the files from disk I'll give it a go.