Wilma is a program for quickly finding text lurking in the files on your computer. It does this by creating an index of what words are in which files and this allows it to later find files containing a given word or set of words almost instantaneously.

Since the mid 1990's, Wilbur nicely fulfilled this function for me, but Wilbur is very much a Windows program and thus not much help to me on my current Linux boxes. Wilma was created not only to be more portable, but to live more comfortably in my much more networked environment.

Wilma consists of the following elements:

• Index Engine - a mixture of Python and C++ code, this provides the core functionality.
• Command Line Interpretor - implements a simply textual interface. This can be used as a stand alone program, but more often will be used by means of a more user friendly interface. Implemented in Python
• Web Server - provides a web browser based interface to the index by means of the command line interpretor. This server can be used in a stand alone mode where it will only accept requests from the same machine it is running on, or can provide multiuser access from anywhere on the Internet. Implemented in Python.

In addition to the source distribution (needed for Unix machines), Windows installers are provided for Win32 machines with Python 2.3 or 2.4 and a complete Mac OS application is available in a gzipped dmg file.

There are installation instructions available here and some additional information can be found by accessing the help served up by a demo version of Wilma which can search Wilbur forum messages and help pages. (currently running on a very slow machine). Here is a screen shot.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.