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[–] 11 points 1 month ago* (6 children)

With Arch, if you have the Yay manager, you can do “yay ” and it’ll search not just the names of packages but the descriptions too. I’m sure there’s equivalents for other distros, and even with pacman itself

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    There's apt-cache search, but I just prefer doing it with the package manager tbh :p

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    IMO apt's search is just not very good at that (or at least it's unintuitive). Even if you know the name of the program, apt-cache search often shows like 90% irrelevant results.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

    According to the man-page at https://manpages.debian.org/buster/apt/apt.8.en.html and the linked https://manpages.debian.org/buster/manpages/regex.7.en.html, you should be able to use regex like apt search '(-|^)vim(-|$)' to get vim as either whole name or related packages with containing vim with leading or trailing dashes, or apt search '^vim' to get any beginning with vim—in case that helps. zypper lets me do essentially that with zypper se '/(-|^)vim(-|$)/' and such.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)

    ... I'll just duckduckgo it instead.

    (I do sometimes use apt-cache search ^[applicationname], but depending on the application it might not help as much as you'd think, and it requires that you know what specific application you want, vs. something general like 'a cd burning application')

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

    I understand what you mean, and tend to agree, although I had some success with zypper se -d '/CD.*burn/'—'CD.*(burn)|(writer)' produced more results than I'd like—for your example. It also appears apt-cache search already searches descriptions by default.

    Looking at results for just /CD/—amid the many poor results—it seems my earlier search missed some due to differing word usage, such as recording rather than burning, and whatnot.

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