GNOME Documents For Linux

GNOME Documents is an open source application that automatically indexes all documents stored on the predefined Documents folder inside your Home directory, as well as from various online accounts, such as Google Documents.

It should not be confused with the Documents folder from your Home directory, as GNOME Documents its an interface for this folder, so you can quickly access your documents, while making the Nautilus (Files) app irrelevant.

While GNOME Documents makes things a lot easier when we have a very large collection of documents organized in many folders and subfolders and we want to search them by title, author and type, it kinda becomes counterproductive when we want to quickly access a document and read it in fullscreen.

The good thing about this application is that it doesn't open any other windows or programs. All the searching and viewing take place in the same window, allowing you to quickly view the first pages of a large document and go back to the entire collection.

Besides, it will display all the documents at once, not categorized in folders or subfolders. You can view them as grid (thumbnails) or as a list with date or creation and their location.

Even if it was recently introduced, the application is now an essential part of the GNOME desktop environment, as it allows users to share, upload, print, view and search documents that are stored locally on your Linux system or remotely on a cloud account.

We can view the documents stored in the Documents folders, or any other folder for that matter, with the Evince application, which is the default document viewer of the GNOME desktop environment.

Actually, we don’t really see the point of this application in the GNOME desktop environment, when we already have access to all of our documents, in any way we want, using the Nautilus file manager.