DocFetcher
129 likes
DocFetcher is an 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.
EU
Features
Properties
- Privacy focused
Features
- Search-in-files
- File content indexing
- Indexed search
- File Search
- Content Searching
- Full-Text Search
- Portable
- Built-in viewer
- Works Offline
- No registration required
- No Tracking
- Ad-free
- Shared Folders
- Reads odt files
- Search in Archives
- Network Scanner
Tags
- search-tool
- desktop-search
- network-search
- lan-search
- text-search
- search-text-in-files
- text-regex-search
DocFetcher News & Activities
Highlights All activities
Recent News
No news, maybe you know any news worth sharing?
Share a News TipRecent activities
kalligator added DocFetcher as alternative to regexxer- K0RR added DocFetcher as alternative to ugrep
POX added DocFetcher as alternative to DeepPeek
POX added DocFetcher as alternative to Cardinal File Search- docfetcher updated DocFetcher
- misterrobato replied to a comment / review on DocFetcher
- misterrobato rated DocFetcher
Featured in Lists
I used these tools during my thesis. There is a lot of information to be processed and without these tools it would be …
List by amritkarmacharya with 11 apps, updated
- File compression - File sharing - Text sharing - Large file transfer - File downloader - File storage - File sync - …
List by wallygator1 with 32 apps, updated
A list with 13 apps by kaekazeh without a description.
List by kaekazeh with 13 apps, updated
What is DocFetcher?
DocFetcher is an 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.
Notable Features:
- A portable version: There is a portable version of DocFetcher that runs on Windows, Linux and macOS. How this is useful is described in more detail further down this page.
- Unicode support: DocFetcher comes with rock-solid Unicode support for all major formats, including Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org, PDF, HTML, RTF and plain text files.
- Archive support: DocFetcher supports the following archive formats: zip, 7z, rar, and the whole tar.* family. The file extensions for zip archives can be customized, allowing you to add more zip-based archive formats as needed. Also, DocFetcher can handle an unlimited nesting of archives (e.g. a zip archive containing a 7z archive containing a rar archive... and so on).
- Search in source code files: The file extensions by which DocFetcher recognizes plain text files can be customized, so you can use DocFetcher for searching in any kind of source code and other text-based file formats. (This works quite well in combination with the customizable zip extensions, e.g. for searching in Java source code inside Jar files.)
- Outlook PST files: DocFetcher allows searching for Outlook emails, which Microsoft Outlook typically stores in PST files.
- Detection of HTML pairs: By default, DocFetcher detects pairs of HTML files (e.g. a file named "foo.html" and a folder named "foo_files"), and treats the pair as a single document. This feature may seem rather useless at first, but it turned out that this dramatically increases the quality of the search results when you're dealing with HTML files, since all the "clutter" inside the HTML folders disappears from the results.
- Regex-based exclusion of files from indexing: You can use regular expressions to exclude certain files from indexing. For example, to exclude Microsoft Excel files, you can use a regular expression like this: .*.xls
- Mime-type detection: You can use regular expressions to turn on "mime-type detection" for certain files, meaning that DocFetcher will try to detect their actual file types not just by looking at the filename, but also by peeking into the file contents. This comes in handy for files that have the wrong file extension.
- Powerful query syntax: In addition to basic constructs like OR, AND and NOT DocFetcher also supports, among other things: Wildcards, phrase search, fuzzy search ("find words that are similar to..."), proximity search ("these two words should be at most 10 words away from each other"), boosting ("increase the score of documents containing...")
DocFetcher information
Developed by
DocFetcher project Licensing
Open Source (EPL-2.0) and Free product.Rating
Average rating of 3.8Alternatives
129 alternatives listedSupported Languages
- English
- German
- Greek
- Spanish
- French
- Hungarian
- Italian
- Japanese
- Dutch
- Polish
- Portuguese
- Russian
- Turkish
- Ukrainian
- Chinese
Comments and Reviews
For looking inside documents, even though there are good alternatives, I'd say this is the absolute best. And I've tried all I've come across. No learning curve, you just tipe anything more or less related with what you're looking for in ordinary language and it will give you results. Almost immediately too. Only problem is, even the so called portable needs Java installed. This was the reason I finally decided to give it up and move on. BUT, since I found no other as satisfying I decided to give it another try. And I've just found that, with portable Java in the same folder as docfetcher and a little tweak in the docfetcher.bat file (which you can find in "https://sourceforge.net/p/docfetcher/discussion/702424/thread/430d6676/?limit=25" if this is ok. for me to say) you no longer need to install Java in your PC and can even launch the program from a USB. As a result you'll need to launch it from the .bat, not from the .exe, so you can't pin it to the taskbar and so on but, aside from that, it works like a charm.
This is an unusual piece of garbage (at least on Windows - WIN7/WIN10). Every new version invalidates indexes. Have to recreate the definitions for indexes quite frequently, hangs, basically its never ready to use when you need it, I'd much rather use a non-index based search that actually works.
The idea is good and description in their site too, also open source is a big plus but in comparising to Eerything it is very slow imo, also has no comfortable multiple selection, nor multi rename.
It's not a file search like Everything, it's a content search, and it doesn't state anywhere it has renaming capabilites. The name says it all, DocFetcher, it fetches content from documents, that's all.
Does the job more or less if you show it some love. If you have the money and want a better out-of-the-experience the paid software is the way to go.
PROS
✔ works well, once configured ✔ free ✔ portable ✔ fast results ✔ some options available ✔ incremental indexing ✔ focussed indexing
CONS
– a lot of trial and error to configure – needs more gui options – gui odd in some ways – indexer dies on big/weird files. – indexing many files could take days.
Crashed at first due to memory limits but this went away after the suggested workarounds.
I liked and used Docfetcher for Windows for a few years on a corporate managed PC. It was one of the few desktop search options after the high bar set by Google Desktop Search which I loved and was super easy. 😢 I've also tried X1 and Copernic-Trial and liked X1 the best, but that cost the most money.
This product should not be listed as an alternative to filename-only indexers like Everything. It "looks inside" at the contents of files not just the filename. DocFetcher actually makes a good companion use alongside a filename-indexer like Everything.
It worked fine when I used an x86 Windows 8.1 system. After I upgraded to 64 bit it no longer worked on the new system. I have both java 1.8* and Python x64 installed, but it fails to launch. I had to move to another program. Luckily, I already had one ready. It is a very old abandonware — searchinformdeskfree4.0.exe The free version only allows 1 index at a time. There are no other serious limitations. And I make 2 indexes and mount/unmount them to use them one at a time. I can create an infinite amount of indexes, but have to use one at a time. That's it. So, it's a good replacement for DocFetcher. It also had a selection of indexes. The new program also compresses its index much better, it is clearly much more compact. So, goodbye, DocFetcher.
I've used this for several years on multiple folders of lots of different document types, including Outlook PSTs. For a open-source, free, and unfortunately unmaintained application it has worked extremely well for me.
I learned to copy the data files of interest (>50GB) as well as the indexes, etc. into a new folder structure to do backups. I've been able to restore those backups to other systems successfully. The whole shebang can even be run on a USB drive.
Useful if you have a single folder where everything goes and you cannot find your files there (not a good solution but My Documents becomes such a folder sometimes). Yes, you need to change the list to be searched from time to time, but for folders smaller than the whole partition - it works fine.