Real Files / Folders Search Unity Lens: Unity Place Filesearch

Unity has a "Files & Folder" lens (place) to search for recently used files or folders but it can't be used to search for files or folders you've never accessed. But there's a brand new Unity lens developed by David Briscoe called "Unity Place Filesearch" that you can use to search any files or folders on your system.

Unity Place Filesearch can also be configured: you can set what folders to be included in the search (by default it's only your home folder) as well as what to ignore. Personally, I find this a lot more flexible and useful then the default Unity Files & Folders (if you do too, you can even remove the default Unity Files & Folder lens).

Install Unity Place Filesearch

To install Unity Place Filesearch, open a terminal and copy/paste the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pydave/unity-lenses
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install unity-place-filesearch

Then you need to run the following command for the new lens to show up:

setsid unity

You can also configure which folders are used for the search results or blacklist some folders. For this you need to edit the ~/.filesearch.cfg file (it's a hidden file in your home folder) - to edit it, open a terminal and run the following command:

gedit ~/.filesearch.cfg

Configuring this file is pretty obvious: add comma separated list of folders to search on line 3 and folders to ignore under "[ignore]". Once you configure everything, run the following commands:

killall unity-filesearch-daemon
setsid unity

If for some reason the new folders are not picked up by Unity Place Filesearch, restart your computer.

Report any bugs you may find @ Unity Place Filesearch Launchpad page.