Rga: Ripgrep, but also search in PDFs, E-Books, Office documents, zip, tar.gz

I have mixed feelings about these kinds of tools.

I can understand it might be nice to have a personal library of PDF books and searching in them. I can't think of a time I've ever wished I could search my bookshelf in that way, but you never know.

Obviously I use tools like ripgrep for searching codebases and the like.

But the extreme flexibility of this one in particular (and others like MacOs Spotlight) makes it seem more like a data recovery tool for me. If my directory structures and databases ever completely failed for some reason I might need to search through everything to find the data again. It's good to know such tools exist, I suppose.

But my fear is that tools like this teach people to not worry about organisation of data and to just fill up their disks with no structure at all. I think that unless something goes terribly wrong nobody should ever need a tool like this. Once you rely on it, you're out of luck it if it ever fails you. What if you just can't remember a single searchable phrase from some document, but you just know it must exist somewhere?

It's similar to what Google has done to the web. When I was growing up it used to be a skill to use the web. People used tools like bookmarks and followed links from one place to another. Now it's just type it into Google and if Google doesn't know, it doesn't exist.

I noticed that you can use Tesseract as an OCR adapter for rga. Tesseract is written in python, IIRC, and in the OP it comes with a warning that it’s slow and not enabled by default. Are there any other fast, reliable OCR libs out there? Or any rust OCR backends?

I mean, I understand what you mean when it comes to Google -- the web essentially becomes locked into a particular proprietary solution to finding information. I definitely still have hundreds (maybe into the thousands?) of bookmarks of sites that store information I care about.

But I don't think this tool deserves the same sort of mixed feelings. I don't think this replaces structure -- there's still value to having a conceptual mapping of where documents are stored, and for grouping sets of documents together. It's just that having a structure doesn't help if you don't know where in the structure something is stored. This sort of tool is a bottom-up approach for the times when the top-down approach doesn't work very well.

Do you have similarly mixed feelings if sometimes, even with my carefully-crafted set of bookmarks with all their nested folders, I use the search tool to find the bookmark I'm looking for? It's the same idea. Sometimes a top-down structure is beneficial. But sometimes things get misclassified, or you forget about some piece of the structure, or you aren't familiar with some new structure, and in those cases, having bottom-up tools are immensely useful. There's no risk of vendor lock-in here. It's just a difference of approach in information retrieval.

One a related note there is one program that I absolutely miss on Linux called everything (on windows).

The closest I can find is mlocate but it does not have a GUI but more importantly it does not index my Windows or NTFS drives.

Would appreciate any suggestions if someone knows something like 'everything' for Ubuntu.

It would be nice to have a direct comparison with ugrep. In the case of rg the benchmarks are already enough to switch. Why should I use rga instead of ugrep?