Ooof. I’ll be honest. I head hister, i think about that nostradamus theory.
So did anybody try this and wake to share their experiences?
- Does it use lots of CPU, RAM or disk?
- Are the search results actually good?
- Does it use a browser extension or so to get new visited sites, or do I have to import my history every day?
- Does it also have a crawler?
Also, why would I use this over e.g. YaCy?
What’s the difference between this and SearXNG?
Huh, just from browsing the homepage, this seems to be more for searching local files.
It’s not. It makes local versions of websites you visit so you can search them
Hmm, thanks. I did browse the page but I didn’t understand well that aspect
I currently use the find-grep function in emacs, which is basically:
find . -type f -exec grep 'my.*search.*pattern' {} +To do PDFs, I use something like
find . -type f -iname \*pdf -exec pdfgrep 'my.*search.*pattern' {} +My problem is generally when TOKEN1<space>TOKEN2 has a line break between tokens. It’s fucking annoying that grep is line-by-line. I wonder if Hister solves that problem. But from the website, I see no advanced syntax. I would love to search a pattern like
word1 w/s word2, which would find cases where word1 and word2 appear in the same sentence. Andword1 w/p word2to match cases where two words are in the same paragraph.Replacing line breaks with nulls first is an option. That’s a lot of extra processing for very large blocks of text though.
Using regular grep is possible with the right flags, or you could also use
pcre2grepwith the-Mflag, which should be available on every distro nowadays. See this Stack Overflow article for details.pcregrepis not automatically installed with Debian but it’s in the official repos. It seems common to get:pcregrep: Too many errors - abandoned. pcregrep: Error -8, -21 or -27 means that a resource limit was exceeded. pcregrep: Check your regex for nested unlimited loops.But it will help in many cases. I can see that it works on sufficiently small files. I noticed the built-in grep function for emacs can be modified to use pcregrep w/-M added instead of grep, which I find quite important because emacs makes it very easy to jump around to visit different results. In the end it’s still a hack.



