3.9 KiB
breadsearch
Semantic document search for Bread OS. Type a concept — not a keyword — and get ranked hits from your documents.
Two binaries in one Cargo workspace:
- breadmill — background daemon. Walks configured directories, extracts text, chunks and embeds documents with nomic-embed-text-v1.5 (768-dim ONNX), stores vectors in an HNSW index (usearch) backed by SQLite metadata, and serves queries over a Unix socket. Watches for filesystem changes and re-indexes incrementally.
- breadsearch — GTK4 overlay GUI. Queries breadmill via the Unix socket and shows ranked results. Press Enter to open a file, Ctrl+Enter to reveal its folder, Esc to close. Bind it to a hotkey (e.g. Super+/) and invoke it as a toggle.
Build
System dependencies: gtk4, gtk4-layer-shell, librsvg.
cargo build --release
The ort crate downloads a bundled ONNX Runtime at build time (no system onnxruntime needed for the default CPU build).
Optional features:
| Feature | What it adds |
|---|---|
npu |
AMD XDNA NPU via VitisAI ONNX Runtime EP (requires Ryzen AI SDK) |
rocm |
AMD iGPU via ROCm ONNX Runtime EP |
# NPU build
cargo build --release -p breadmill --features npu
Setup
1. Fetch the embedding model (~550 MB, downloaded once from Hugging Face):
breadmill fetch-model
Model files are stored in ~/.cache/breadsearch/models/.
2. Enable the systemd user service:
cp packaging/breadmill.service ~/.config/systemd/user/
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable --now breadmill
Or run it directly: breadmill serve (or just breadmill).
3. Copy the example config (optional — built-in defaults are used otherwise):
mkdir -p ~/.config/breadsearch
cp config.example.toml ~/.config/breadsearch/config.toml
breadsearch (GUI)
breadsearch
Invoking again while running closes the window (PID-toggle). Bind to a hotkey in your compositor config.
Results show: filename/title, full path, and a snippet from the matching chunk. Score is cosine similarity as a percentage.
User CSS overrides go in ~/.config/breadsearch/style.css.
breadmill (daemon / CLI)
# Start the daemon (also the default when called with no arguments)
breadmill serve
# Force a full re-index from scratch
breadmill reindex
# Download model files
breadmill fetch-model
# Query from the terminal
breadmill query "tax stuff"
# Show daemon status (chunks indexed, pending, model ready)
breadmill status
# Backend flags (requires the matching Cargo feature)
breadmill --npu
breadmill --rocm
Config
~/.config/breadsearch/config.toml — all keys are optional; built-in defaults are shown.
[index]
roots = ["~/Documents", "~/Projects", "~/.config/breadpad"]
extensions = ["md", "txt", "org", "pdf", "odt", "docx"]
excludes = [] # paths to skip (prefix match)
max_file_mb = 10.0
[search]
limit = 10 # max results per query
snippet_len = 200 # max characters in result snippet
[model]
name = "nomic-embed-text-v1.5"
dim = 768
backend = "cpu" # "cpu", "npu", or "rocm"
roots and excludes support ~/ expansion. The index respects .gitignore files found during the walk.
NPU backend
Set backend = "npu" in config (or pass --npu) when running a build compiled with --features npu. breadmill looks for the VitisAI EP config file in this order:
$VAIP_CONFIG~/.config/breadsearch/vaip_config.json~/.local/share/ryzen-ai-1.7.1/voe-4.0-linux_x86_64/vaip_config.json/etc/vaip_config.json/opt/xilinx/vaip_config.json
Runtime paths
| Purpose | Path |
|---|---|
| Config | ~/.config/breadsearch/ |
| Index (SQLite + HNSW) | ~/.local/state/breadsearch/ |
| Model cache | ~/.cache/breadsearch/models/ |
| Unix socket | $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/breadmill.sock |