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Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

I have been using Ubuntu since before Unity (when this 'dash' thing arrived) and I don't think I have ever used the dash.

If I need to find a file or something on the internets I am more likely to think 'I must use Gopher for this!!!' than I am ever to think of using 'Ubuntu dash'. It is one of those helpful creations like the F1 key that is a great idea in theory but not used in practice.

In some way they have managed 'brand awareness' with the dash debacle, inevitably it was always going to fall by the wayside though. Command line tools like 'find' and 'grep' are always going to be vastly superior to these WysiWyg contraptions.

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Give the recoll package (and Unity scope) a try and your opinion might change. I use this all the time and it's pretty amazing to just type a string of text into the dash and see whichever document contains that text string appear in my search results. If I already have a terminal window open I'll do grep -R "text-string" /dir/ or if not I hit the super key and type the text string for recoll, both are equally fast.

I have a backup laptop which spends almost all of its time in a closet. It's got Ubuntu 15.04 and the default stuff, dash included, because I didn't want to spend time to customize it.

I use the dash it as I use Alt-F2 on my main laptop (a gnome flashback install): I type the first characters of the program to run and that's it. I do it maybe once or twice per day, usually the few desktop applications I need are open all the time, included a fair number of terminals. It didn't seem to be particularly good at finding files but maybe it needs time to scan the disk and I gave it very little of it (time). locate seems to work better and it's more convenient as it can be grepped and parsed.

'find' and 'grep' don't work on your Google Drive docs though

They do if you export it through a synthetic file system interface.

Sounds like yet another reason to use real files instead of giving all your data to Google (and thereby the NSA).

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