A friend of mine was looking around for a decent file indexer for Ubuntu since he's relying on this approach to manage his files on OS X (and Windows 7 does it too). I got interested in the topic, and personally I agree with him and think it's such a shame that no indexing software is present and integrated in recent linux distributions by default, especially since this has been in past (with Tracker and Ubuntu, but also with Beagle and openSUSE) with good success and reception.
At the time of writing Tracker seems the only full-featured system remained alive and the best option among the various solutions.
So here's my little contribution to this. I give you a little lens (well, technically a scope, which provides data for the file lens) that integrates Tracker with the Ubuntu Unity interface. I bundled the code with tracker-needle, which is the current official GUI for this indexer, but if there's good request I can make a separate package, which would make more sense, I think.
To install the software execute:
git clone git://github.com/hoheinzollern/tracker.git
sudo apt-get build-dep tracker
sudo apt-get install libunity-dev
cd tracker
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install
Beware the fact that it’s still an experimental plugin, that might have some errors and still doesn’t support filtering files by size and edit date.
You can poke around the source code in GitHub at the address https://github.com/hoheinzollern/tracker
Let me know what you guys think, and if this can be integrated with the official Tracker distribution or even in Unity.
Cheers!