Poor Man's Spotlight

PMsS is a minimal desktop search service, designed to run with multiple backends, currently:

• configurable filesystem search
• emoji search

Nature of the project

The project is a tool I've written for myself, but it's also a research about writing GUIs in Rust versus Ruby.

The previous version of this project was written in Ruby, but had very severe limitations.

My current plan is to rewrite the Ruby project with updated version of the libraries (which solve the problems), and publish an article about writing GUIs in the two languages.

Basic information

The file search configuration must be stored in $HOME/.pm-spotlight, and it's a TOML file with content like this:

search_paths = [
  "Desktop",
  "/usr/include_path{1}",
]
skip_paths = [
  "skip_path",
]

Paths not starting with / are relative to $HOME. Numbers in braces at the end of search_path entry are the search depth.

If the user types a pattern starting with a colon (:), the request will be sent to the emoji search backend.

Tapping enter on an entry will:

• file search: execute the file
• emoji: copy the emoji to the clipboard