Baloo/Configuration

This page documents all of the values that can be used to configure Baloo File Indexing. The config file is generally present as ~/.config/baloofilerc for Frameworks 5 (including Plasma 5), and ~/.kde4/share/apps/config/baloofilerc in the kdelibs 4.x world (old Plasma).

Some of these changes will only take place on restarting the baloo_file process, e.g. with balooctl disable then balooctl enable.

Enable / Disable

   [Basic Settings]
   Indexing-Enabled=true

This can be changed to true / false.

First Run

   [General]
   first run=false

This `first run` config value determines if Baloo has run through the entire file system and checked every file for indexing. If you ever delete the baloo db manually, this should be set to false so that baloo scans the entire file system tree again on startup.

Exclude Filters

   [General]
   exclude filters=autom4te,*.rcore,CTestTestfile.cmake,*.o,*.omf,.hg,*.m4,*.orig,.obj,moc_*.cpp,conftest,.pch,.xsession-errors*,CMakeTmpQmake,*.tmp,qrc_*.cpp,po,.svn,.histfile.*,lzo,.bzr,.git,litmain.sh,cmake_install.cmake,CMakeFiles,*.pc,*.nvram,*.elc,*.la,.moc,CMakeCache.txt,confdefs.h,*.gmo,*.csproj,*.rej,config.status,lost+found,confstat,*.pyc,_darcs,CVS,.uic,*.part,libtool,*.aux,*.po,CMakeTmp,Makefile.am,*.lo,ui_*.h,*.loT,*~,*.moc,*.vm*,*.class,core-dumps

This list of patterns is run against each file in order to determine if the file should be indexed.

Exclude Mimetypes

   [General]
   exclude mimetypes=text/plain, image/jpeg

By default a lot of source code is not indexed

Exclude Folders

   [General]
   exclude folders[$e]=$HOME/FolderA/,$HOME/FolderB/

This list is comma separated and is used to check which directories should never be indexed. By default this list is empty.

Include Folders

   [General]
   folders[$e]=$HOME/

This list governs which folders Baloo should index recursively. By default, it will index your $HOME directory. The $e allows environment variable expansion. Baloo does not follow symbolic links, so give the actual paths to directories you want Baloo to index.

For example, if you have a Windows drive mounted at /media/Windows, here is a sample line to index some common folders of user "Alice".

 folders[$e]=$HOME/,/media/Windows/Users/Alice/Desktop/,/media/Windows/Users/Alice/Documents/,/media/Windows/Users/Alice/Downloads/,/media/Windows/Users/Alice/Music/,/media/Windows/Users/Alice/Pictures/,/media/Windows/Users/Alice/Videos/

Only index Files Names

   [General]
   only basic indexing=true

This will trigger Baloo to only index the filename.

Reindexing

After changing what Baloo indexes, you may have to make Baloo index existing files. Entering the command balooctl check in a terminal should make Baloo search for unindexed files and index them. If this doesn't happen, you can manually tell Baloo to index specific files with a terminal command like balooctl index local/path/to/file1 path/to/file2 ....