CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

A full record of the changes to Find, grouped by type. Ulauncher installs the extension straight from the repository, so each entry is dated by when the work landed on the main branch, and the version tags mark the points published as GitHub releases.

2026-06-01

A reliability pass on the search engine, with a full test suite behind it.

Added

• Multi-word search. Two or more words narrow the results to paths where every word appears somewhere, in any order, so ff budget wedding finds a honeymoon-budget.numbers filed under a Wedding folder. A single word still matches the filename only, so a common word does not drag in every file under a folder that happens to share its name.
• Search time limit preference, default 5 seconds. A search that finds fewer results than the result limit keeps looking until this many seconds pass, then shows what it found. Lower is snappier; raise it to catch matches across large drives or separate partitions. A search that reaches the result limit still shows at once.
• A test suite covering the command builder, multi-word matching, relevance ranking, the streaming reader, the time limit, preference parsing, and the terminal action.

Changed

• Exact results are ordered by relevance rather than the order fd happened to reach them. A file whose name matches more of the query words ranks above one that matches only through a parent folder, and the order is now identical from one repeat of a search to the next.
• The reader collects a larger pool of candidates and then ranks it, so the results shown are the best matches rather than whichever ones fd returned first.

Fixed

• Searches no longer give up early and drop matches. The reader used to stop at the first lull in fd's output; on a large or slow drive fd goes quiet for seconds while crossing an empty subtree, so a file that existed often never appeared and a different handful showed each run. It now reads until the result limit, fd finishing, or the time limit, with no early stop on a lull.
• A file whose name is not valid UTF-8, common on external or Windows-formatted drives, no longer aborts the search.
• A query beginning with a dash is searched for literally instead of being read as an fd option.
• "Open in terminal" works again. It was handing the launcher an argument in a shape it could not run, so nothing happened. A directory whose name contains shell characters is now passed safely. Added Ptyxis to the auto-detected terminals.
• A blank or non-numeric preference value (result limit, time limit) falls back to its default and reports a clear message, instead of silently breaking the next search.

Internal

• Replaced the line-buffering subprocess wrapper, which had no effect on fd's output, and read fd's standard error through a temporary file so a flood of warnings cannot stall the search.
• Froze the preferences data class, renamed the fd binary resolver to a public name, and removed an unused preference loader.

Documentation

• Rewrote the readme around the current behaviour, with example queries that match the screenshots, and replaced the single superseded screenshot with five current ones.

2026-05-23

Internal

• Moved the private working-file ignore rules (editor notes, exports, scratch files) to a user-level global gitignore, so the repository's own .gitignore only carries rules that belong to the project.

2026-04-21

A large hardening and usability pass across search, preferences and results.

Added

• Multiple base directories: search several comma-separated locations at once, walked together under one keyword.
• Terminal command supports a {} placeholder, so an unsupported terminal can still be used by giving its full command with the directory slot.

Changed

• Results stream in as fd finds them rather than waiting for the whole walk to finish, so a narrow query with genuinely few matches no longer times out with "No results found". (This introduced an early-stop bug that was fixed on 2026-06-01.)
• Multi-word queries matched against the full path, with a single word still matching the filename only. (Superseded on 2026-06-01 by all-words-in-any-order matching.)
• Exact matching is literal, so ., ? and * behave as typed rather than as patterns.
• The system icon is resolved for each result rather than cached when the extension loads, so a change of icon theme is picked up without a restart.

Fixed

• Real subprocess failures now surface as an error in the launcher instead of a silent empty result that read as "No results found".
• The fd process is cleaned up when fzf times out, so an abandoned fuzzy search leaves no orphaned processes behind.

Internal

• Keyword lookups read the raw preferences from disk, flattening Ulauncher 6's separate triggers section, so the active keywords are always current.
• The icon lookup logs a failure at debug level instead of swallowing it silently, and the preferences read failure carries its traceback.

Documentation

• Keyword display names in the preferences now show their default shortcut, for example "Find files only (ff)".
• Rewrote the readme for the fd/fzf backend, the keyword scheme and usage tips.

2026-04-01

Internal

• Added Dependabot dependency updates and CodeQL security scanning to the CI workflows.

2026-03-29

A move off the system index to live search, with a redesigned result list.

Added

• Fuzzy matching through fzf, on a new fz keyword.
• System file icons, resolved by type through GIO and Gtk, shown beside each result.
• Query highlighting, so the matched part of a result name stands out.

Changed

• Replaced the locate/plocate backend with fd for instant search that needs no index to maintain and returns results in real time.
• New keyword scheme: fz (fuzzy), f (all), ff (files only), fd (directories only), replacing the earlier fd/ff/fdir set.
• Results show over two lines, the name and the containing path, and the consistent term throughout is "directory".
• Searches default to the home directory rather than the whole filesystem.
• The shortest query that triggers a search dropped from three characters to one.

Fixed

• Capped the number of candidates fed to fuzzy matching so a broad fz query cannot crawl the whole filesystem before fzf filters it, and aligned the fallback base directory with the manifest default.

2026-03-28

Fixed

• Saved preferences take effect on the next search instead of needing a Ulauncher restart, by reading them from disk on each query. This works around Ulauncher 6 beta not delivering preference-update events in its version 2 compatibility mode.

2026-03-26

Added

• Named actions for the Ulauncher 6 result menu, so it shows "Open" and the chosen Alt+Enter action rather than generic labels.

2026-03-24

Added

• Initial release. Find files and directories by name with three keywords (fd, ff, fdir), case-insensitive matching through locate, a configurable result limit, and a choice of action on Alt+Enter (open the containing folder, open a terminal there, or copy the path). Options for hidden files, following symbolic links, a custom ignore file and a custom terminal command were present from the start.