dowse

A read-only search tool for finding text in files covered by a Windows full-text index, including documents, PDFs, notes, and code.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to find a document by words or a phrase, inspect matching passages, check which folders are indexed, and obtain the file's absolute path.
Why use it?
It helps locate files across indexed folders without scanning the whole disk or guessing paths. A preview shows more context before you open the real file.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ltspace/dowse/skill
Any agent
npx skills add ltspace/dowse --skill skill
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ltspace/dowse

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 67 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 795 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00067 $0.00795
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.00398
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00159
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00080

Measured 3d ago against content hash efdae56af5e2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

dowse scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 3d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skill/SKILL.md · 45 lines

What it actually says

dowse:本地全盘搜索

dowse 是一个常驻 Windows 的本地全文搜索索引(tantivy + jieba 分词),浮窗应用 负责建索引、增量更新;这个 MCP server 是它的只读查询接口,不提供任何会修改 索引的工具。用户问"我硬盘上关于 XXX 的笔记/文档/配置在哪"这类问题时,优先用 这里的工具而不是让 agent 自己去遍历文件系统或调用 grep 类工具。dowse 的索引 覆盖了用户机器上所有已收录的目录,一次查询就能跨全盘命中,比现场扫描快得多、 也不会漏掉不在当前工作目录下的文件。

三个工具怎么组合用

  1. search:先用它定位候选文件。传查询词(支持空格分隔多词 AND 语义、 "短语查询"),可选按扩展名过滤(ext,如 "md""pdf")。返回按相关度 排序的命中列表,每条带 pathscoresnippet(命中词用 «» 标出)、 kind(文件类型)。

  2. preview:从 search 结果里挑一条,把它的 path 和当时用的 query 传 给 preview,拿到一段长得多的上下文(约 1500 字,也带 «» 高亮),外加 文件大小、修改时间。search 的 snippet 只有 160 字左右,判断"是不是这篇" 经常不够,需要看更多上下文时用 preview,不用自己去读整个文件。

  3. index_status:不需要参数。想知道索引里有多少文档、覆盖了哪些根目录、 索引落盘多大、最近一次更新是什么时候,调这个。比如 search 一直没命中时, 可以先查一下 index_status 确认索引没坏、确实收录过东西。

典型顺序:search → preview(可选)→ 如果要进一步处理这个文件,直接把 search/preview 返回的 path 喂给文件读取工具(Read 之类)或系统资源管理器, 不需要再转换或拼接,它就是磁盘上的真实绝对路径。

用不到的时候

  • 索引里没有的目录(用户从没让 dowse-app 收录过)搜不到,这不是 bug,是 dowse 的设计边界,它只覆盖用户主动收录的目录。index_status 的 roots 字段能看到当前覆盖了哪些目录。
  • 索引不存在或损坏时,工具会返回结构化错误加一句建库指引(dowse index <目录>), 不会崩溃;看到这个提示时告诉用户去 dowse-app 浮窗或命令行建一次索引, 不要自己瞎猜路径重试。
  • 这里没有任何写操作:建索引、重建索引、增删收录目录都不在这个工具集里, 需要用户自己在 dowse-app 浮窗或 dowse index 命令行里做。
Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 3d ago First seen · 45 lines · 67 tokens per session scan A efdae56af5e2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

dowse is a skill published in the GitHub repository ltspace/dowse (12 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 67 tokens to every session and 795 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.