Why has gnome-search-tool gone?

Solution 1:

It was removed for being unmaintained, but you can use mate-search-tool instead which is available from the repository and is exactly the same thing.

sudo apt install mate-utils
mate-search-tool

As an alternative you can use searchmonkey which performs the same task.

I've been using it for awhile now and I like it a lot better because it will show you a preview of how your search phrase is used in each file allowing you to quickly scroll though the resulting files without having to manually open each one up.

As a side note, if you're searching the entire filesystem, searchmonkey gets lost in /proc and takes forever. To solve this I use the find command with -xdev to search only real files in the current filesystem like so:

find / -xdev -type f -print0 | xargs -r0 grep -Hi 'your search string here'