[9fans] nb—search and index notes in files by keyword

[9fans] nb—search and index notes in files by keyword

[Steve Simon]

perhaps of interest is seft [http://ww2.cs.mu.oz.au/~oldk/seft/]
which works well for me. It is unusual in that it allows all the usual
text searching tools (including AltaVista's long lamented () "near" operator,
but does not use indices, it does it the hard way.

Before you dismiss this as slow, its just a matter of exactly what your
problem is. Mine is a relatively small amount of rather dynamic data.

if you want it I oprted it to APE here: contrib/install steve/seft

-Steve

Re: [9fans] nb—search and index notes in files by keyword

[erik quanstrom]

On Mon Mar  8 16:35:12 EST 2010, steve@quintile.net wrote:
> perhaps of interest is seft [http://ww2.cs.mu.oz.au/~oldk/seft/]
> which works well for me. It is unusual in that it allows all the usual
> text searching tools (including AltaVista's long lamented () "near" operator,
> but does not use indices, it does it the hard way.
>
> Before you dismiss this as slow, its just a matter of exactly what your
> problem is. Mine is a relatively small amount of rather dynamic data.
>
> if you want it I oprted it to APE here: contrib/install steve/seft

from
	http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F6653%2F17766%2F00824381.pdf%3Farnumber%3D824381&authDecision=-203

i get
	"we call seft, offers performance that in a retrieval
	effectiveness sense matches conventional information
	retrieval systems, and in a resource efficiency sense,
	while considerably slower than grep-like tools, is fast
	enough to be useful on hundreds of megabytes of text

why would we go for "slower than grep"?  wouldn't it be simpler
put a new queryish interface on grep á la 9fans.net/archive?
what am i missing?

- erik

Re: [9fans] nb—search and index notes in files by keyword

[Steve Simon]

> why would we go for "slower than grep"?  wouldn't it be simpler
> put a new queryish interface on grep á la 9fans.net/archive?
> what am i missing?

It allows a subtly different set of query tools which make
sense to less regexp savvy people I work with, and it prints
results with contex which our grep doesn't (yet? :-).

-Steve

Re: [9fans] nb—search and index notes in files by keyword

[erik quanstrom]

On Mon Mar  8 18:30:34 EST 2010, steve@quintile.net wrote:
> > why would we go for "slower than grep"?  wouldn't it be simpler
> > put a new queryish interface on grep á la 9fans.net/archive?
> > what am i missing?
>
> It allows a subtly different set of query tools which make
> sense to less regexp savvy people I work with, and it prints
> results with contex which our grep doesn't (yet? :-).

it could easily be done with pre and post processing.  no?
say a pass through tokenize and a little text frobbing.

or is there some real special sauce?

- erik

Re: [9fans] nb—search and index notes in files by keyword

[Peter A. Cejchan]

i wiill give it a try
you might also want to check out my (ape) port of glimpse
/n/sources/contrib/pac/sys/src/ape/cmd/txt/glimpse-4.18.6.tbz
thanks,
++pac

[9fans] nb—search and index notes in files by keyword

[Jason Catena]

http://swtools.wordpress.com/2010/03/05/nb%E2%80%94search-and-index-notes-in-files-by-keyword/

This isn't complicated, but it hit a sweet spot with me, since I like
to break up information into smallish chunks and index it by keyword.
It collects the keywords into one file per directory, and keeps a list
of all the indexes in a file in $HOME.  It searches all the existing
indexes for the given keyword, then reconstructs the index for the
current directory, so it presents slightly older results fast.  Its
relationship with plan9 is that it's written in rc, and outputs lines
in a /path/file:line format for right-clicking with acme.  I'm posting
it here because I find it really useful, and I wish I'd come up with
it years ago.  The more you put into it the more useful it becomes,
since it's got a fine degree of granularity (the particular keywords
attached to a bit of information) and composability of keywords (just
string a few grep and grep -v after the nb command).

Jason Catena