GTK+ has had support for Tracker for a while as a backend search engine used in the GtkFileChooser. At GUADEC this year, the Tracker team were asked to update the backend at the GTK+ team meeting. I found time this week to add support and push my changes to the tracker-with-libtracker-sparql branch.
For now, I have dropped support for all older versions of Tracker because it really is a mess to maintain and GTK+ 3.0 should really be using the latest and greatest APIs anyway. The other change I made was to support searching by filenames not the content of files. There is a #define in the .c file (FTS_MATCHING) which allows switching between using FTS (Full Text Search) and filenames (which are usually part of an FTS search anyway). For me, finding a file based on the name itself seems more intuitive for the GtkFileChooser and tends to yield results I am really looking for better than the FTS matching. In most cases, I don’t want to find a file based on some content when choosing a file. I would appreciate any comments on this.
A demonstration of the new functionality:
