3 Basics

This chapter is a brief introduction into quaneko. It should give you an overview over what quaneko is and what it can do for you.

What is quaneko?

quaneko is a tool that allows you to quickly search for keywords in the files and directories on the local hard disk. It creates indexes over the words in those files. For you, this means that a typical search query will only take seconds.
quaneko can not only search for words in plain text files but also in various other file formats, depending on its configuration (e.g. doc, pdf, html, xml, ..).

What is quaneko not?

quaneko focuses on searching local harddisks. It is not a web crawler or web search engine.

Is quaneko for me?

There are various reasons why you might consider using quaneko:

• You have a lot of personal and downloaded data on your hard drive and finding the right file has become difficult and time consuming.
• There are folders on your hard drive that contain a lot of files which don't have speaking names. For example files that are numbered like 'rfc1006.txt', 'rfc1234.txt', ..
• You need to be able to search the file contents of non-text documents such as Word doc, PDF or other formats.

Choice of User Interfaces

quaneko comes with two user interfaces: a graphical user interface (GUI) and a command line interface (CLI). Which one you want to use is mainly a matter of taste. However, if you need to automate the indexing or query process, the CLI is usually the better choice.