Odi's astoundingly incomplete notes

KDE clear baloo db

KDE Plasma 5 has this nice launcher that lets you simply start typing and will display search results. Unfortunately they are completely useless. Because they come from Baloo.

The first thing Baloo does is read your whole freaking hard drive and create a full text index from it. Well thanks. I never asked for that. Guess how long that takes for today's disk sizes. And guess how interesting results are from tons of Java API Doc that happens to be installed somewhere deep in a forgotten corner of the file system.

Well, you think, let's just clear the index and let it only index what seems to be useful. Then to your surprise the settings dialog provides no such controls to clear the index. There is a CLI tool called balooctl that even has a clear command. But that seems to accept only individual full path names.

OK disable baloo via CLI: balooctl disable
or tell Baloo's config file what you really want.
Using strace I was able to find where baloo stores its index: ~/.local/share/baloo. Simply nuke this unfortunate thing out of existance.

See also the checkbox 'Expand search to bookmarks, files and emails' in Application Laucher Settings.

posted on 2016-04-13 21:55 UTC in Code | 4 comments | permalink

Thank you! That helped me ignore the nagging feeling that I might be throwing away something important.

Second step: echo "[General]\nonly basic indexing=true" >> ~/.config/baloofilerc

Thanks! That was useful. My Index file was grown to 11GB! Not I have done "balooctl disable" and I can forget about this thing ;)

Thank you. The file indexer should be off by default, especially for content.

You can do balooctl purge to clear the index

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