Two Search addons are in development that offer advanced Person finding features. Each takes a different approach. Both could use some end-user feedback to move them towards publication.
Search Gramplet by Vantu5z had been marooned in the 5.1 branch approval queue since 2022. Complete enough to be useful with searching People but with a ToDo list for other objects that implied it wasn’t ready for publication. Ivan doesn’t have spare time to add more features. So it is past time to get the initial Person-search-only version out to the community.
It has just been published to the 5.1 addons (thanks @GaryGriffin !) but needs a “maintainer” advocate to adopt it and push it as a beta version to the 6.0 branch. (Yes, skipping the 5.2 branch. It needs the “adventurous” community to explore it. It can be backported later.)
Fulltext search is an experimental tool by @kku, creator of SuperTool and a host of other Gramps addons in the Isotammi project. It is an exciting interactive search that checks in all the text fields related to a person. Can’t remember which person has a particular username in their Internet accounts, or was it a Nickname, or was it in a Note, or was it in an Attribute, or in the Description field of a custom “Membership” type Event? No problem, Fulltext search simultaneously checks all these and offers a list of possible matches.
The “Fulltext search” addon uses the whoosh library for the index and it stores the index in the filesystem (subdirectory “indexdir” in the database directory).
Yes, you are correct, Rebuild index is usually not needed and it can give the wrong impression that the index needs rebuilding after changes in the family tree. Actually the addon captures all database updates and then updates the search index accordingly.
And you could always rebuild the index by deleting it first. So maybe I will remove the rebuild button (and then also save some screen space!).
