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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sist2, but it targets Linux (on Windows it only runs via Docker), treats Chinese text as trigrams, and the project is no longer maintained.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