When comparing Recoll vs locate, the Slant community recommends locate for most people. In the question“What are the best desktop search tools for Linux?” locate is ranked 1st while Recoll is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose locate is:
locate updates its database usually daily and from there it can retrieve matching file names almost instantly.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Finds text inside zip files
Pro Python language integration
Python extension for Python 2 and Python 3.
Pro Repositories and packaged binaries available
Can be easily installed through official repositories for popular distros, or alternatively it can also be built from source.
Pro Near instant file name matching
locate updates its database usually daily and from there it can retrieve matching file names almost instantly.
Pro Installed by default on most distributions
The "locate" command is probably already installed and setup on your Linux. Just run it.
Pro Regexp option
Uses the extended POSIX regex.
Cons
Con Flawed search
Two term search fails to find documents that contain the second term that are found by searching for the first of those terms.
Con Does not index all document types natively
Since it does not index all file types natively, it may need extensions and plugins to be able to find them.
Con Cannot search inside files' content
Locate only search by file name and has no knowledge of their content. Yet it can be mixed together with tools like xargs
and grep
to look inside content of possibly relevant files quickly.