gdrive-search

Warning: I used this to learn Rust. It might be the worst Rust ever.

Fifty percent learning Rust, fifty percent building a CLI to very quickly search & access files in your Google Drive.

On my Mac I had the Google Drive desktop app, and an Alfred workflow to use that synchronised filesystem to quickly search & open Drive files. But I haven't found an equivalent super-fast autocompleting search & open for Linux so I decided to build one.

What does it look like?

Hitting enter would then open in your browser

What works?

• Sign in with Google Drive (if you follow setup below).
• Sync files & folders (currently fetches incrementally, every 5 minutes) and save to file.
• Interface for searching for file/folders.
• Open chosen file/folder in your web browser.

Google Drive API setup notes.

This dance will be familiar if you've used any other open source tools that use the Google Drive API.

• Create a new project

• Enable the Google Drive API for your project

• Setup oauth consent screen

• Create a new oauth client ID

• Download the JSON provided and put it in the configuration directory. This varies depending on operating system:

  Platform	Value	Example
  Linux	$XDG_CONFIG_HOME or $HOME/.config/gdrive-search/clientsecret.json	/home/alice/.config/gdrive-search/clientsecret.json
  macOS	$HOME/Library/Preferences/gdrive-search/clientsecret.json	/Users/Alice/Library/Preferences/gdrive-search/clientsecret.json
  Windows	{FOLDERID_RoamingAppData}\gdrive-search\clientsecret.json	C:\Users\Alice\AppData\Roaming\gdrive-search\clientsecret.json

Roadmap

• Some indication of what type of file/folder each entry is.
• Can we fetch in the background whilst skim loads to make it even faster?
• A way of resetting the configuration.
• Better error handling if config files are in an invalid state.
• Multi-account support.
• A way to force a fetch from scratch.