Catfish For Linux

Catfish is an open source, free and handy graphical application designed in GTK+ to provide GNU/Linux users with a capable file search utility that helps theme to locate their files on the local file system.

It is a GUI (Graphical User Interface) for different file searching backends, which are intractable, configurable only via the command-line interface. Catfish is known to support popular search engines, such as locate, slocate, tracker or beagle.

Its user interface is designed to be simple and lightweight, and the configuration options for each backend are taken directly from the command-line options of the respective search engine. It works well with all GNU/Linux operating systems.

The application’s GUI is modern, as it follows GNOME’s HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) specifications. While it is designed for the GNOME desktop environment, Catfish can also be used on other open source desktop environments or window managers, such as MATE or Cinnamon.

The main toolbar includes all the tools you need to locate your files, such as a drop-down menu from where you can choose where to search files, the search box, two view modes (Compact List and Thumbnails), and the app’s menu, from where you can enable full text search, exact match search, and display of hidden files.

While the software doesn’t come with a settings dialog, it will provide some advanced options on a sidebar, on the left of the window. The sidebar can be enabled from the app’s menu, by clicking on the “Show Advanced Settings” entry or by hitting the F9 key on your keyboard.

The advanced settings sidebar will allow user to organize search results by modification date (any time, this week or custom), as well as to let them search by file type. This means that you can search only images, videos, music, documents or applications.