Affinity

Affinty is a desktop search tool, which hopes to provide a quick way to get at all the different information on your desktop. It achieves this by having various back-ends, but implemented through one standard interface. Speaking of the interface, have a look:

Yeah, if I forgot to mention, Affinity is RGBA-aware, so it not only does it do its job well, it look good doing it :).

Current Features

• Front-end to both the Beagle & Tracker desktop search engines.
• Has actions (configurable through Desktop files), whihc speed up common tasks.
• Has in-built, user-configurable, filters which work in the the entry box, so typing 'pics:london' will only bring up pictures.
• Super-fast application searching through an in-built list of applications.
• Colours can be customised to your taste.
• Lives in the system-tray, but can be called by a global key stroke. Default is Ctrl+Alt+a, but you can change it to anything you like!
• Written in C for minimal impact on your system, but maximum speed!

Planned Features

• Connect 'Places' to HAL, so automatically shows mounted devices.
• When you press the glocal keystroke, if Affinity shown but is not 'active' raise the window, instead of hiding it.
• Metabar widget, which will provide more details about the currently selected serach result & an 'Actions' widget which provides more ways to manipulate the result.
• Support for Tasks & Calender events. Plus better support for bookmarks.
• Create results view depending on the current filter. For instanc, using the image filter could show a icon view, rather than tree view, and have larger icons.
• Add a 'spinner' to allow the user to see when the serahc has finished.

Thats all I can think of for now. If you have more requests, just open an issue here on code.google.com, or send me a mail.

Download

Affinity Search is currently under development, however, you can try it out by either downloading the latest relase from the downloads page or by grabbing the latest source code form the subversion repository.

Affinity requires the following development packages to be present on your system (naming conventions may vary from distribution to distribution):

• gnome-vfs-2.0
• gtk+2.0 >= 2.10
• libgnome
• gconf-2.0
• gnome-desktop

Additionally, you will need the development packages for you desktop search daemon, this would be either the development packages for beagle (libbeagle), or Tracker.

Please bear in mind that Affinity currently only works on gtk+-2.0 >= 2.10, I am working on 2.8 support. Also, Affinity should work without RGBA (i.e. without Beryl or Compiz), but this has not been extensively tested.

Documentation

Not much by way of documentation yet, but heres some hints:

• Pressing Ctrl-L in the main search window will focus the entry widget.
• Pressing Esc will hide the Affinity window.
• The default global keystroke is <Ctrl>Alt>A, this will hide or un-hide Affinity.
• You can configure the global keystroke by navigating to /apps/affinity in gconf-editor, and changing the global_key_binding value. You must restart Affinity for the changes to take effect.
• Use affinity-preferences to changes colours, filters & system applications.
• When you change a colour in affinity-preferences, you may need to hide/show the window for the changes to take effect.
• Clicking on the notification area icon will show/hide the window, right-clicking will bring up a pop-up menu that will allow you to exit Affinity.

Bugs

Here's a list of know bugs:

• Scrolling up & down fast on the tree view will leave artifacts, which disappear if you run your mouse over it or press a button.
• If it segfaults, please try svn.

Author

Neil J. Patel <njpatel_AT_gmail_DOT_com>