GitHub – gsidhu/buzee-tauri

Full-text search app for Mac and Windows

Buzee (pronounced boozey) is a eight-year-old labrador retriever who can’t play fetch but can love you like no other.

Buzee is also a full-text search application for your life. It helps you find your files, effortlessly.

Download v0.2.0 from the Releases page.

• Fast, full-text search for all your documents, images, audio, video, folders, and browser history.
• Search all local documents and folders by keyword, time, type, or any combination of these.
• Ignore specific files or folders from being indexed. Or ignore only their content.
• View search results in a list or icon view.
• View statistics about your files.
• Sub-features:
  • Extract text from PDFs and Images using OCR.
  • Use a Scratch Pad to quickly jot down notes.
• Automatically syncs with changes on your filesystem.
• Lightweight installation package and low memory usage.
• Supports these default file types:

Documents: csv, docx, key, md, numbers, pages, pdf, pptx, txt, xlsx, xls
Images: jpg, jpeg, png, gif
Books: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Audio: mp3, wav, aac, flac, ogg
Video: mp4, mkv, avi, mov, wmv

Index:
(~) : partly implemented
(+) : has to be built from scratch
(?) : not sure if it will add great value

• (~) Show matching text for search results by reading from the body table.
• (~) Browser history search should support complex queries the way document search does.
• (~) Icon view should load thumbnails in an efficient, non-blocking manner. Thumbnails should show up on the page as they are loaded.
• (~) Enable adding ‘comments’ to documents.
• (~) Enable pinning documents/folders to the top of search results.
• (~) Allow user to add or remove supported file types.
• (~) Allow user to switch between profiles on Arc and Chrome. (Currently uses the default profile)
• (~) Test for Linux.
• (~) Improve the speed of parsing PDFs, Images and XLSX files. Especially OCR operations.
• (+) Enable adding ‘tags’ to documents.
• (+) Create a ‘Dashboard’ view that shows statistics, pinned documents, and recent searches.
• (+) Add tests to the codebase.
• (?) Record frecency of documents and use it to sort search results.

Back-end:

• Rust
• Tauri v2 beta
• SQLite
• Tantivy

Front-end:

• Svelte 4 using TypeScript
• shadcn-svelte
• TailwindCSS

See all dependencies in the Cargo.toml and package.json files.

• All file metadata is stored in SQLite in the document table. A central metadata table stores the metadata from files and eventually cloud services, emails etc.
• A full-text index is created on metadata and stored as the metadata_fts table.
• Parsed text from documents is stored in the body table.
• A full-text index is created in Tantivy at the same time.
• The Firefox, Chrome and Arc history is searched using their respective history databases directly.
• All front-end code is in the src directory. All back-end code is in the src-tauri directory.

Read the Vision and Roadmap.

I have spent two years building this project. It started as an Electron app, then I switched to Tauri for performance gains. When I started I barely new JavaScript and Svelte. Over the course of development, I learned NodeJS, TypeScript, SQLite, Rust, Tauri, Tantivy, and many other technologies. I learned so much about managing a project of this size and complexity. I am proud of what I have built but I am more proud of what I have learned.

I am now letting go of this project because I have other priorities. Please feel free to do with this project as you wish. I am happy to help you get started with the codebase.

If nothing else, this project can serve as an example of how to build a full-text search engine using Tauri and Tantivy. There are several tiny features and performance workarounds that I have implemented that you might find useful.

If you do do something with this project, please let me know. I would love to see what you build!

MIT