Re:WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of th...
by fit2rule on Monday May 18, 2020 @05:16PM
(#23228467)
Yeah, my computer is fast enough that I can just do "find . -name '*.pdf' -exec pdftotext {} \; | grep -i someSearchTerm" and come back later. Bonus points that it stays in my Terminal for reference later in the day as needed.
Re:WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of th...
by wolfhumble on Monday May 18, 2020 @08:06PM
(#23229836)
Is there a reason why you don't use mdfind instead (built-in spotlight search from the terminal)?
That way you can search pdf files directly from the terminal without converting to text first, and the directory is already indexed.
E.g:
[$]mdfind -onlyin ~/MyDirectory someSearchTerm
Re:WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of th...
by fit2rule on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @12:50AM
(#23231357)
1: Force of habit, since I use grep and silversearcher elsewhere a lot, but 2: I hate the mdfind indexer service putting garbage all over my disks, so I've turned it off and forgotten about it.
Re:WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of th...
by burntsushi on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @07:02AM
(#23233509)
ripgrep can actually do this seamlessly with its preprocessors: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/b72ad8f8aa897191c...
pdftotext gets the actual text from the PDF. I don't do this, but I'm sure that you could automate the process of generating a text file for each PDF in a directory with pdftotext and then ripgrep the text files when it's time to search the contents. That would be doable with a makefile or a couple of shell scripts.