Baloo

Introduction

Baloo is the file indexing and file search framework for KDE Plasma. It focuses on speed and a very small memory footprint. It maintains an index of your files and optionally their contents which you can search.

Contributing

Baloo is part of the KDE umbrella and relies on the KDE infrastructure.

Mailing List: kde-devel@kde.org (info page) Bug Tracker: http://bugs.kde.org (new bug) IRC Channel: #kde-baloo on Libera Chat

The recommended way of contributing patches is via KDE's GitLab instance.

Documentation

Users

• Searching
• The Baloo pages on KDE Community Wiki have information on Baloo's command-line tools and how to monitor its operation.

Developers

• [Build Instructions](@ref build-instructions)
• Baloo follows the KDE Frameworks coding style.

Distributions

Baloo is developed and tested exclusively for Linux. While it may run on other unix based systems. It is not recommended, and certainly not tested.

We do not recommend to package Baloo for Windows or OSX as both these operating systems offer their own file searching solutions which better integrate with the native system than Baloo ever will.

Baloo may run on 32-bit systems, but it has not been tested and may not work correctly. Please test and let us know by filing a bug.

Supported Kernels: Linux Supported Architectures: x86_64, aarch64 Supported Filesystems: ext3/4, Btrfs, XFS

File Indexing Plugins

Baloo relies on KFileMetaData to extract content from the files. KFileMetadata ships with a number of plugins which can be enabled or disabled. We recommend shipping all KFileMetaData plugins. Specially ffmpeg by default. Without the indexers, Baloo cannot function to its full potential.