Is it possible to integrate pdfgrep into nemo search?

Question

I often find myself looking for PDF documents. Luckily, I found pdfgrep that really does a great job at finding PDF documents by content.

Following command lets me search for documents that have my search word on the first page

pdfgrep -irl --page-range=1 2>/dev/null 'mysearchword'

Is it possible to integrate this command into the Nemo file manager search?

Answer 1

Yes!

https://github.com/linuxmint/nemo/tree/master/search-helpers explains how:

1. Write a script or program that takes a file name and outputs the plain text of that file
2. make that script executable
3. Write a search helper definition file and put it into ~/.local/share/nemo/search-helpers.

Luckily, the first part has already been done by the PDF library that pdfgrep uses internally: There's a pdftotext utility.

So what you'd need to do is install pdftotext (sudo apt install poppler-utils), and write a application-pdf.nemo_search_helper:

[Nemo Search Helper]
TryExec=pdftotext
Exec=pdftotext %s
MimeType=application/pdf;
Priority=100

and put it in application-pdf.nemo_search_helper.

---

Fun fact:

that's already implemented in nemo 5, there's a pdftotext search helper, so you don't have to do anything. Just install poppler-utils, and you should get that search when hitting ctrl+f in nemo.

Not so fun fact: Ubuntu 21.10 is surprisingly conservative

... in the version of Nemo it ships: you need nemo 5, but it ships nemo 4.

You can build the official nemo source into a Ubuntu package and install it, but no guarantees are made. This might break things on your system, I haven't tested the functionality!

Now, you can build nemo from source:

sudo apt install git-buildpackage
git clone https://github.com/linuxmint/nemo
cd nemo
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

which will complain about missing packages:

dpkg-checkbuilddeps: error: Unmet build dependencies: cinnamon-l10n debhelper-compat (= 12) dh-python gobject-introspection gtk-doc-tools (>= 1.4) intltool (>= 0.40.1) itstool libatk1.0-dev (>= 1.32.0) libcinnamon-desktop-dev (>= 4.8) libexempi-dev (>= 2.2.0) libexif-dev (>= 0.6.20) libgail-3-dev libgirepository1.0-dev (>= 0.9.12) libglib2.0-dev (>= 2.45.7) libglib2.0-doc libgsf-1-dev libgtk-3-dev (>= 3.10) libgtk-3-doc libnotify-dev (>= 0.7.0) libpango1.0-dev libx11-dev libxapp-dev (>= 2.0.0) libxext-dev libxml2-dev (>= 2.7.8) libxrender-dev meson python3-gi x11proto-core-dev

Simply install these (the list might look different to you!) using

sudo apt install cinnamon-l10n debhelper-compat  dh-python gobject-introspection gtk-doc-tools  intltool itstool libatk1.0-dev  libcinnamon-desktop-dev  libexempi-dev  libexif-dev libgail-3-dev libgirepository1.0-dev libglib2.0-dev libglib2.0-doc libgsf-1-dev libgtk-3-dev libgtk-3-doc libnotify-dev libpango1.0-dev libx11-dev libxapp-dev libxext-dev libxml2-dev  libxrender-dev meson python3-gi x11proto-core-dev

then try again:

dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

Which should now work flawlessly. (it does for my fresh Ubuntu 21.10 container). You can now install:

cd ..
sudo dpkg -i gir*.deb libnemo*.deb nemo-data*.deb nemo_*.deb
# there will be config errors of the above; run apt-get install to fix these:
sudo apt-get install -f

There you go, you'll have a bleeding edge nemo installation now.