64h01101001h / gofer Goto Github PK

Back in the mid-eighties, a company called Microlytics released a
product called GOFER for MS-DOS.  Gofer was a file search tool that
would rapidly search a directory tree for files containing a match to
an expression containing eight search terms, each of which was a
literal string, and each of which could be combined with the others
using "or" and "near".  So you could say "find files matching "a" or
"b" or "c" or " d " within 10 lines of "e" or "f g" or "h i j" or "k",
for example.  Unfortunately, Microlytics went out of business and
never released a version of GOFER for Windows or Linux.

There are a lot of search tools available nowadays, but they're mostly
extremely complicated, like xapian, or line-oriented, like grep.  Line
oriented search tools are virtually useless for searching text, and
tools like xapian are just too hard to get working for regular folks.

So this project is intended to be a functional replacement for GOFER.
Since the trademark has been let lapse, I'm using the same name so
that old GOFER aficianados will be able to find this, but if the
original authors are bugged by this, please contact me and I will pick
a new name - this is intended as a tribute, not as claim jumping!
GOFER is still in active use by the Asian Classics Input project; the
reason for writing this new version is that a version of GOFER running
in DOS is very hard to use on a Linux or Mac system, and it would be
really nice to be able to cut and paste out of a GOFER window.

The core code is a simple command-line version of the software.  No
regexp support yet, because that's not really what GOFER did, but I
will be adding that.  I've done a simple GUI in Qt and another in
Cocoa; future work would include a GUI for Windows, perhaps for Gnome,
and a web version.   Currently the Qt code is stale--I haven't
compiled it in quite some time.   The Cocoa UI is the one that is
most stable.   It currently only works for versions of OS X that
support Auto Layout.

To use the command line, type "gofer dir1 ... dirN", where dir1
through dirN are names of directories to search, and you don't type "..."
on the command line.   You will get a prompt, "> ".   At the prompt,
you type in a search expression.   WHen you are done with your expression,
type "end" on a line by itself.

The expression can be a simple string, "look for me!!!", or a combination -
usually "look for me" or "look for the other me".   You can group with
parentheses.   You can search for a string nearby another string:
"look for me" within 3 lines of "and you will find me."

The Cocoa UI does the same thing, with a bit more panache; hopefully
it's self-explanatory.