Beagle (software)
Search system for Unix
title: "Beagle (software)" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["desktop-search-engines", "defunct-internet-search-engines", "software-that-uses-mono-(software)", "free-software-programmed-in-c-sharp", "software-using-the-apache-license", "software-using-the-mit-license"] description: "Search system for Unix" topic_path: "general/desktop-search-engines" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_(software)" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0
::summary Search system for Unix ::
::data[format=table title="Infobox software"]
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| name | Beagle |
| logo | Beagle logo.png |
| screenshot | Beagle-search.png |
| caption | A screenshot of Beagle's UI |
| developer | Beagle Team |
| released | |
| discontinued | yes |
| latest release version | 0.3.9 |
| latest release date | |
| latest preview date | |
| programming language | C# |
| operating system | Linux, other Unix and Unix-like systems |
| language count | |
| genre | Search tool |
| license | A mix of the X11/MIT License and the Apache License |
| website | |
| :: |
| name = Beagle | logo = Beagle logo.png | logo alt = | screenshot = Beagle-search.png | caption = A screenshot of Beagle's UI | screenshot alt = | collapsible = | author = | developer = Beagle Team | released = | discontinued = yes | latest release version = 0.3.9 | latest release date = | latest preview version = | latest preview date = | programming language = C# | operating system = Linux, other Unix and Unix-like systems | platform = | size = | language = | language count = | language footnote = | genre = Search tool | license = A mix of the X11/MIT License and the Apache License | website = | standard = | AsOf = ::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/Best.png" caption="Old user interface for Beagle, code named Best"] ::
Beagle is a search system for Linux and other Unix-like systems, enabling the user to search documents, chat logs, email and contact lists. It is not actively developed.
Beagle grew out of Dashboard, an early Mono-based application for watching 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 was developed and maintained by Joe Shaw with help from the open source community. Notable contributors included Jon Trowbridge, Robert Love, Nat Friedman and David Camp.
Features
Beagle searches the content of documents and associated metadata. Users can search for:
- Applications
- Archives (zip, tar, gzip, bzip2) and their contents
- Conversations (Pidgin, Kopete and IRC logs)
- Documents (AbiWord, OpenOffice.org, Microsoft Office, pdf, txt, rtf, HTML)
- Emails and address book contacts (from Evolution, Mozilla Thunderbird (header info only) 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 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 additional file types not natively supported using external tools through a configuration file.
On Linux, Beagle efficiently indexes documents using inotify without the need for frequent reindexing.
References
References
- [https://mail.gnome.org/archives/dashboard-hackers/2010-January/msg00001.html not actively developed]
- [https://archive.today/20130415100515/http://nat.org/dashboard/ Dashboard]
::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::