DocFetcher is described as 'Open Source desktop search application: It allows you to search the contents of files on your computer. — You can think of it as Google for your local files. The application runs on Windows, Linux and macOS, and is made available under the Eclipse Public License' and is a very popular File Search utility in the file management category. There are more than 100 alternatives to DocFetcher for a variety of platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD and Flathub apps. The best DocFetcher alternative is Recoll, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like DocFetcher are FSearch, Listary, Agent Ransack and Cling Fuzzy Finder.
Quick macOS file searching with substring, prefix, suffix, exact, and path-mixed patterns, case-sensitive or regex search modes, instant language switching, keyboard shortcuts, Quick Look previews, Finder integration, clipboard copy, and open-source code.
Semantic desktop search finds files, emails, and photos by meaning, running AI models locally on Windows. Supports 70+ file types, OCR image search, 50+ languages, instant document previews, AI chat, duplicate detection, and encrypted, private indexing.
grep is a command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets for lines matching a regular expression.
Indexes and quickly searches over 170 file types and emails, including attachments and multimedia files, on desktops, external and network drives, as well as cloud environments, offering sub-second results and a 75,000 file index size limit in the free version.
GNOME Do allows you to quickly search for many items present on your desktop or the web, and perform useful actions on those items.
The program seems to be no longer updated. Last version, 0.95.3, released on November 2014, can be still downloaded from Launchpad.
AstroGrep is A Microsoft Windows GUI File Searching (grep) utility. Features include regular expressions, versatile printing options, stores most recent used paths and has a "context" feature which is very nice for looking at source code.
Doesn't support folder indexing like DocFetcher, searching can take a long time.
Cross-platform desktop search application offering rapid full-text and regular expression search, recursive folder filtering, result highlighting, large file support, and a lightweight native UI built with Tauri and powered by ripgrep, ideal for complex codebases.
dnGrep allows you to search across files with easy-to-read results. Search through text files, Word documents, PDFs, and archives using text, regular expression, XPath, and phonetic queries. dnGrep includes search-and-replace, whole-file preview, right-click search in File...
Doesn't support folder indexing like DocFetcher.
SearchMyFiles is a non-indexing portable alternative to the standard "Search For Files And Folders" module of Windows. It allows you to easily search files in your system by wildcard, by last modified/created/last accessed time, by file attributes, by file content...
Spotlight is the system-wide desktop search feature built into Apple's OS X operating system since version 10.4 (Tiger). Backed by an index of all items and files on the system, it's designed to allow the user to quickly locate a wide variety of items on the computer...
Seek, peek, and preview to find your work instantly — even if it's buried in folders, or you've lost track of it over the months.
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It's goal is to trigger actions, not to search text among files.