Docfd aims to provide good UX via integration with common text editors and PDF viewers, so you can jump directly to a search result with a single key press.

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I originally wrote this tool to help me dig through text/markdown notes, since very often I want to search for a phrase of sorts that may span across multiple lines, but constructing the corresponding multiline regex is a bit painful (especially painful if I want to account for fuzziness), and I still have to guess the ordering of the words. Furthermore, I'd still have to sift through all the results, even the irrelevant ones.

fzf's core is kinda there for some cases, but I want the fuzziness to be constrained around each individual word, i.e. each word matching some other word of +/- N edit distance, instead of this whole line matching other whole line +/- N edit distance or other metric. And fzf also doesn't do multiline as far as I can tell (or I'm being silly).

Since nothing quite fit my taste, I decided to make something with a relatively straightforward UI/UX (I gave up on many tools purely because I cannot be bothered to remember yet another set of keybindings), ranks all the results for me using a "pretty alright" heuristic, and allows me to open the file to the search results easily.

Support for PDF (via pdftotext) and DOCX etc (via pandoc) were added later on based on suggestions I got from Reddit users despite my initial reluctance. But after eating my own dog food for a while I have to say they were very right.