dowse

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dowse

Open-source local file content search for Windows. Find file names, PDF and Office contents, source code, and text inside screenshots — one hotkey away.

Website · English product page · Windows file-content search guide（中文）

The name comes from a dowsing rod.

Motivation

No Windows tool satisfies all three of the following at once:

• Keep a persistent index of file contents, not just file names (Everything can scan contents on demand, but its instant index is centered on names and paths)
• Recognize and index text inside images on ordinary Windows PCs without requiring a Copilot+ device
• One hotkey to summon, full keyboard operation, no perceptible latency

The closest open-source implementation is sist2, but it targets Linux (on Windows it only runs via Docker), treats Chinese text as trigrams, and the project is no longer maintained. dowse is a Windows-native implementation built around these three points.

Features

dowse vs. the alternatives

Chinese text handling

• Word segmentation via jieba, ranking via BM25 (tantivy engine). No trigrams.
• Automatic file encoding detection (chardetng). GBK-encoded files are decoded correctly before indexing — this matters because a large share of Chinese-language documents on Windows, especially older ones, are still saved in GBK rather than UTF-8, and a search tool that assumes UTF-8 will silently mis-index or garble them.
• Multi-term queries default to AND semantics. Quoted phrase queries match on exact position. Inline operators narrow things down further: path:reports, mtime:>2026-01-01, size:>10mb, uppercase OR between groups, -term to exclude.
• OCR runs on the Windows-native engine (Windows.Media.Ocr), fully offline. The zh-Hans language pack also covers mixed Chinese/English text, no extra configuration required.

Performance

Design targets; exceeding them is treated as a defect. "Measured" is a from-scratch benchmark of dowse 0.7.0 (i7-13700K / 24 logical cores / 64GB RAM, single machine, single session, 2026-07-12), reusing the byte-identical corpus from the v0.6.1 round-3 benchmark for direct comparability. Full raw output (index/search logs, JSON result files) is kept with the benchmark working directory, outside this repo.

Full-corpus rows measured on the same 10,000-file / 437.66MB text corpus plus 5,100 synthetic 480×200 OCR images (89.8MB) used for the v0.6.1 round-3 numbers above — byte-identical, reused directly rather than regenerated. Indexing is roughly 2x faster and the on-disk text index roughly a third smaller than v0.6.1; both track the new tokenizer (lowercase normalization, alphanumeric-boundary splitting of Latin words) producing a leaner term dictionary. The zero-result query dropped from 135ms (v0.6.1) to a startup-noise-level 31ms, consistent with less index to scan before concluding a term is absent. OCR recognition speed is unchanged this release, since the pipeline was not touched: single-image recognition stays around 170ms, and the sub-30ms readings on repeated identical images are OS-level caching artifacts, not real recognition. The full-corpus text-plus-OCR pass got faster (83s to 46.6s) from the quicker tokenizer and write path, not from faster recognition.

Quick start

Download — grab the installer from the latest release (dowse-app_*_x64-setup.exe), run it, then Alt+\` to summon.

The installer is unsigned, so Windows SmartScreen will flag it on first run. To proceed, click More info and then Run anyway. A code-signing certificate is a recurring cost that is hard to justify for an independent project; it may be reconsidered for a future release.

Install the CLI — the library and command-line tool ship as one dowse package:

cargo install dowse                 # once published to crates.io

cargo install --path crates/dowse # from a local checkout

Build from source:

git clone https://github.com/ltspace/dowse && cd dowse

CLI

cargo run -p dowse -- index D:\docs # build the index cargo run -p dowse -- search 限流 # search cargo run -p dowse -- search "精确短语" # phrase query cargo run -p dowse -- add E:\projects # add another root incrementally (no full rebuild) cargo run -p dowse -- rules show # view index rules (excluded dirs, extra extensions, size cap)

Overlay app (Tauri 2 + Svelte 5)

cd crates/dowse-app npm install cargo tauri build # produces the installer under target/release/bundle

Overlay app: Alt+\ to summon, ↑↓ to select, Enter to open, Ctrl+Enter to reveal in Explorer, Ctrl+C to copy path, Esc to hide. Results are paginated in groups of 50; the compact ‹ 1 / N › control shows only when needed, and pressing ↓ past the last result or ↑ before the first moves between pages. Two nearly invisible dropdowns sit at the right of the search bar — file type filter (Ctrl+P) and sort order (Ctrl+S, relevance / newest / oldest / largest); both stay faint until you select a non-default value. Right-click a result row for a native Explorer-style context menu (open / reveal in folder / copy path / copy name). A pin toggle at the top-right keeps the window open when it loses focus (session-only, resets on restart). With an empty input, the overlay lists your recent searches (last 10, stored locally) — ↑↓/Enter to reuse one, Delete to remove it. Ctrl+,` opens the settings panel — general (hotkey rebinding, autostart, interface language) and index rules (excluded directories, extra text extensions, per-file size cap).

MCP server

dowse mcp starts a read-only MCP server over stdio, exposing the local index to AI agents:

claude mcp add --scope user dowse -- dowse mcp

Four tools: search (query, bounded limit / offset, sort by relevance / mtime / size, comma-separated ext filter, and a total_hits count), preview (long context + metadata for one hit), read_file_chunk (bounded, paginated text from the indexed snapshot), and index_status (document count, index health, active index rules). The server never touches the index writer or opens arbitrary paths — it only reloads the reader before each call, so it can run alongside the overlay app or a live dowse watch session without write contention.

Architecture

                 ┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐

│ dowse │ │ library core: tantivy index · jieba │ │ segmentation · encoding detection · │ │ text extraction (txt/md/pdf/code/ │ │ docx/xlsx/pptx) · OCR pipeline │ │ ───────────────────────────────────── │ │ CLI + MCP