Real-time search for real files. No index. No daemon. No stale results.
Searchmonkey III is a modern desktop search tool that searches what is actually on disk — right now. It does not maintain a background index, and it does not return outdated results.
The Searchmonkey III project is available at https://searchmonkey.dev.
Most desktop search tools trade accuracy for speed by indexing files in the background.
Searchmonkey takes a different approach:
- Search the filesystem directly
- Stream results as they are found
- Always reflect the current state of disk
This makes it particularly useful for:
- developers working with changing codebases
- log inspection
- large directories where indexing is expensive or unreliable
- environments where background daemons are undesirable
- Node.js (18+ recommended)
- pnpm
- Rust toolchain (for Tauri)
pnpm installDownload the ripgrep sidecar used by the Tauri app:
scripts/pull-rg-bin.shOn Windows:
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\scripts\pull-rg-bin.ps1pnpm tauri devpnpm tauri buildSearchmonkey scans files directly and streams matches as they are discovered.
It is designed to be:
- stateless — no index database
- transparent — what is searched is what exists
- predictable — no background processes affecting results
Searchmonkey can be extended via sidecar artifacts.
For example:
document.pdf
document.pdf.sm.txt
document.pdf.sm.meta
Plugins can generate these files to make otherwise opaque formats searchable.
This enables:
- PDF → text extraction
- DOCX → structured text
- logs → normalized formats
The core application remains simple, while plugins provide additional capabilities.
src/ SvelteKit frontend
src-tauri/ Rust (Tauri) backend
- improved search performance and filtering
- richer match context and navigation
- plugin system for file enrichment
- optional account-backed features (sync, etc.)
Licensed under the MIT License — see LICENSE
Searchmonkey is developed by Axonara Ltd https://axonara.co.uk