Qmd: A Tiny CLI Search Engine for Your Text Files

Ever find yourself digging through folders of meeting notes, documentation, or project logs, trying to remember where you wrote down that one crucial detail? You know it's in a .txt or .md file somewhere, but grep feels too heavy, and opening files one by one is a chore. What you need is a simple, focused search tool that stays out of your way.

That's exactly what Qmd is. It's a minimalist command-line search engine built for the text-based knowledge you accumulate every day. No databases, no web servers—just fast, relevant search across your plain text files.

What It Does

Qmd is a compact CLI tool that indexes and searches through your Markdown (.md) and plain text (.txt) files. You point it at a directory, and it builds a local search index. From then on, you can query that index to instantly find files containing specific terms or phrases. It returns results ranked by relevance, so the most likely matches appear first.

Why It's Cool

The clever part is in its simplicity and focus. Qmd isn't trying to be a universal search powerhouse. It's built for a specific, common developer pain point: quickly retrieving information from your own notes and docs. Because it only deals with plain text, the index is small and searches are blazingly fast. The implementation is straightforward and written in Go, making it easy to understand or modify if you want to tweak it.

Think of it as your personal, offline-aware Ctrl+F for an entire directory tree. Great use cases include:

• Searching through a notes/ directory for decisions made in past meetings.
• Finding a specific configuration snippet in your personal knowledge base.
• Pulling up old project documentation without leaving the terminal.

How to Try It

Getting started is straightforward. You'll need Go installed on your machine.

1. Install the tool:

   go install github.com/tobi/qmd@latest
   

   This will place the qmd binary in your $GOPATH/bin.

2. Navigate to the directory you want to search (e.g., ~/my-notes) and create the index:

   qmd index
   

3. Start searching:

   qmd search "deployment pipeline"
   

That's it. The index file (.qmd) is stored locally in the directory, so searches remain private and instant.

Final Thoughts

Qmd fills a nice little niche. It's the kind of tool you might build for yourself over a weekend to solve an immediate annoyance. The fact that it's been shared means the rest of us don't have to. It won't replace a full-fledged search engine or a dedicated note-taking app, but for developers who live in the terminal and keep things in simple text files, it's a genuinely useful addition to the workflow. It's the digital equivalent of a well-organized, tabbed notebook—everything is exactly where you expect it to be.

Check out the source and contribute over at the GitHub repository.

@githubprojects