Beagle is a search system for Linux and other such modern Unix-like systems, enabling the user to search documents, chat logs, email and contact lists in a similar way to Spotlight in Mac OS X, or Google Desktop under Microsoft Windows.

Beagle grew out of Dashboard, an early Mono based application for watching for and presenting useful information from a user's computer. It is written in C# using Mono and uses a port of Lucene to C# called Lucene.Net as its indexer. Beagle includes a Gtk#-based user interface, and integrates with Galago for presence information.

Beagle is developed and maintained by Joe Shaw, with help from a growing open source Beagle community. Other notable past contributors include Jon Trowbridge, Robert Love, Nat Friedman, and David Camp.

Features

Beagle searches the content of documents and associated metadata. With Beagle, users can search for:

Applications

Archives (zip, tar, gzip, bzip2) and their contents

Conversations (Gaim, Kopete and IRC logs)

Documents (AbiWord, OpenOffice.org, Microsoft Office, pdf, txt, rtf, html)

Emails and Address Book contacts (from Evolution, Mozilla Thunderbird, and KMail)

Help files (Texinfo, man pages)

Images (png, jpg, tiff, gif, svg)

Music files (mp3, ogg, flac)

Notes taken in Tomboy, KNotes, and Labyrinth

RSS feeds (via Blam, Liferea or Akregator)

Source code (C, C++, C#, Fortran, Java, JavaScript, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, and more)

Video files (through MPlayer or Totem)

Web history (Firefox, Konqueror, Epiphany)

Beagle can also index extra file types not natively supported using external tools through a configuration file.

Beagle instantly indexes documents on Linux systems equipped with inotify.