Drill icon
Drill icon

Drill

 4 likes

Search files without indexing, but clever crawling.

Drill screenshot 1

License model

  • Free • Open Source

Application type

Platforms

  • Linux
Drill alternatives  
5 / 5 Avg rating (2)
4likes
2comments
10alternatives
0news articles

Features

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  1.  Ad-free
  2.  Dark Mode
  3.  File Search

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Drill information

  • Developed by

    Unknown

  • Licensing

    Open Source (GPL-2.0) and Free product.

  • Written in

  • Rating

    Average rating of 5

  • Alternatives

    10 alternatives listed

  • Supported Languages

    • English

AlternativeTo Category

File Management

GitHub repository

  •  271 Stars
  •  21 Forks
  •  20 Open Issues
  •   Updated Jun 7, 2025 
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Our users have written 2 comments and reviews about Drill, and it has gotten 4 likes

Drill was added to AlternativeTo by Galandros on Mar 23, 2020 and this page was last updated Mar 23, 2020.

Comments and Reviews

   
 Post comment/review
Top Positive Comment
Dom P
★
★
★
★
★
Oct 18, 2022
0

best file search on linux imo

emascandam
★
★
★
★
★
Jul 23, 2020
0

It is really fast compared to Catfish. Worth giving a try if you only look for files by file name

What is Drill?

TL;DR: What is this

Search files without indexing, but clever crawling:

At least 1 thread per mount point Use as much RAM as possible for caching stuff Try to avoid "black hole folders" using a regex based blocklist in which the crawler will never come out and never scan useful files (node_modules,Windows,etc) Intended for desktop users, no obscure Linux files and system files scans Use priority lists to first scan important folders. Betting on the future: slowly being optimized for SSDs/M.2 or fast RAID arrays

What is this

I was stressed on Linux because I couldn't find the files I needed, file searchers based on system indexing (updatedb) are prone to breaking and hard to configure for the average user, so did an all nighter and started this.

Drill is a modern file searcher for Linux that tries to fix the old problem of slow searching and indexing. Nowadays even some SSDs are used for storage and every PC has nearly a minimum of 8GB of RAM and quad-core; knowing this it's time to design a future-proof file searcher that doesn't care about weak systems and uses the full multithreaded power in a clever way to find your files in the fastest possible way.

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