FORUM-SCOUT — A lightweight GTK3 desktop app that searches multiple Arch-based Linux forums at once

musqz · May 25, 2026, 4:47pm

Hello all,

I like to introduce Forum Scout.

A simple Gui for searching the major arch based distro’s on issues.

Available on repo:

Mabox # thanks to @napcok
Manjaro # thanks to Yochanan
Aur # thanks to Yochanan

yay forum-scout

Features

Multi-source search — query Discourse forums, Arch Wiki and Arch BBS in one go
Sortable results — click any column header to sort by forum, title or date
Bookmarks — save topics, open or copy links, filter and sort · results marked ★ when already bookmarked · remove directly from the results list
Search history — re-run any previous search with one click
Forums toggle — hide the forum selector with the Forums ▾ button to free up space for results
Dropdown suggestions — live topic suggestions as you type (press Space)
Color-coded forums — consistent colors across Results and Bookmarks tabs
Hover tooltip — full title and URL on mouse-over
Keyboard shortcuts — Ctrl+L focus search · Ctrl+F toggle forums bar · Escape clear · F5 re-run
Persistent settings — window size, hits per source, active forums and forums bar state saved on exit
Multilingual — 18 languages auto-detected from $LANG: Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Farsi, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian

Sources

Forum	Type	API
Mabox	Discourse	Discourse JSON
EndeavourOS	Discourse	Discourse JSON
Manjaro	Discourse	Discourse JSON
CachyOS	Discourse	Discourse JSON
Garuda	Discourse	Discourse JSON
RebornOS	Discourse	Discourse JSON
Arch Wiki	Wiki	MediaWiki JSON
Manjaro Wiki	Wiki	MediaWiki JSON
Arch BBS	BBS	DuckDuckGo site-search (off by default)

Hope you like it.

Disclaimer: Parts of this tool were built with AI assistance (Claude Sonnet by Anthropic). All code has been reviewed and tested by me.

musqz · May 26, 2026, 12:58pm

[FUN STUFF]

Hacking forum-scout for your own forums

Want to swap out a distro forum for one that fits you better?

It’s one line of code.

Open forum-scout.py and find the FORUMS list near the top (~line 49). Each entry
looks like this:

 {"name": "Mabox", "type": "discourse", "url": "https://forum.maboxlinux.org",
  "color": "#c49000", "on": True, "group": "distro"},

To replace Mabox with NixOS for example, just change it to:

{"name": "NixOS", "type": "discourse", "url": "https://discourse.nixos.org",
  "color": "#5277c3", "on": True, "group": "distro"},

That’s it. As long as the forum runs Discourse, “type”: “discourse” works out of the box — no other changes needed.

To add a new entry instead of replacing, just paste a new line in the list.

Pick any hex color you like for that forum.

The “group” field controls which row it appears in:

“distro” — top row
“wiki” — middle row
“de” — bottom row (KDE, GNOME style)

Works for any Discourse-based forum on the internet.

Have fun!

CacheMeIfYouCan · May 27, 2026, 2:34am

Qt version is up

Lovely.

musqz · May 27, 2026, 8:34am

Update:

Forum-Scout (Qt) v.0.5.0 (available in the aur)

yay forum-scout-qt
4 aur/forum-scout-qt 0.5.0-1 (+0 0.00) 
    Arch-focused multi-forum search tool (Qt/PyQt6 edition)

forum-scout-qt

Enjoy searching and learning Arch stuff

Uncle_Spellbinder · May 27, 2026, 9:13am

Excellent! I have a pretty heavily themed KDE Plasma desktop. It looks great! Thanks!

Uncle_Spellbinder · May 27, 2026, 9:28am

Is this normal behavior? When launching Forum Scout, both the application itself and Python are launched.

Once Forum Scout fully loads, its application icon disappears leaving only the Python icon. So, I can’t pin it to the bottom panel.

musqz · May 27, 2026, 10:26am

@Uncle_Spellbinder Hahah 2 forums.

Try v0.5.2

yay -Syu forum-scout-qt

ps: Also added more keybinding for a keyboard driven flow.

musqz · May 27, 2026, 10:38am

Note:

I am an openbox user. So I am really pleased with feedback from KDE plasma users.

QT is in development. Openbox no so much for some time. This will change when labwc is a real killer for openbox.

Hope the tool is usefull for dummies and advanced arch users.

Uncle_Spellbinder · May 27, 2026, 2:29pm

Version 0.5.4-1…

All is well. Thanks!

musqz · May 28, 2026, 5:33am

Latest releases both Gtk / QT

One of the obvious changes

Able to add remove all forums/wiki/ddg off the menu (gtk/qt) – I am working on a kinda how to.
Good for mouse and key driven flows.
Undo for last removed bookmark
For full changelog, visit github

Help !!! No forums in the menu?

cp /usr/share/forum-scout/forums.conf ~/.config/forum-scout/forums.conf

# Forum Scout — forum registry
# One entry per line. Fields:
#   name    display name (required)
#   type    discourse | mediawiki | ddg (required)
#   url     base URL (required)
#   color   hex color for the checkbox label (required)
#   on      true/false — default checkbox state (default: true)
#   group   distro | wiki | de — which row in the forums bar (default: distro)
#   page    mediawiki only — URL template for article links (optional)
#
# To add or remove forums, edit this file directly.
# To keep your changes across package upgrades, copy this file to:
#   ~/.config/forum-scout/forums.conf
#
{"name": "Mabox",        "type": "discourse", "url": "https://forum.maboxlinux.org",       "color": "#c49000", "on": true,  "group": "distro"}
{"name": "EndeavourOS",  "type": "discourse", "url": "https://forum.endeavouros.com",       "color": "#0891b2", "on": true,  "group": "distro"}
{"name": "Manjaro",      "type": "discourse", "url": "https://forum.manjaro.org",           "color": "#16a34a", "on": true,  "group": "distro"}
{"name": "CachyOS",      "type": "discourse", "url": "https://discuss.cachyos.org",         "color": "#7c3aed", "on": true,  "group": "distro"}
{"name": "Garuda",       "type": "discourse", "url": "https://forum.garudalinux.org",       "color": "#db2777", "on": true,  "group": "distro"}
{"name": "RebornOS",     "type": "discourse", "url": "https://rebornos.discourse.group",    "color": "#dc2626", "on": true,  "group": "distro"}
{"name": "Arch Wiki",    "type": "mediawiki", "url": "https://wiki.archlinux.org",          "color": "#2563eb", "on": true,  "group": "wiki"}
{"name": "Manjaro Wiki", "type": "mediawiki", "url": "https://wiki.manjaro.org",            "color": "#22c55e", "on": true,  "group": "wiki",   "page": "index.php?title={slug}"}
{"name": "CachyOS Wiki", "type": "ddg",       "url": "wiki.cachyos.org",                    "color": "#7c3aed", "on": true,  "group": "wiki"}
{"name": "Arch BBS",     "type": "ddg",       "url": "bbs.archlinux.org",                   "color": "#ea580c", "on": false, "group": "wiki"}
{"name": "KDE",          "type": "discourse", "url": "https://discuss.kde.org",             "color": "#1d99f3", "on": true,  "group": "de"}
{"name": "GNOME",        "type": "discourse", "url": "https://discourse.gnome.org",         "color": "#3584e4", "on": true,  "group": "de"}

musqz · May 28, 2026, 10:42am

Xfce4 forum had a problem, but it is possible now.

Edit ~/.config/forum-scout/forums.conf

Add xfce4 wiki

{"name": "XFCE4",     "type": "ddg",       "url": "https://forum.xfce.org/",                   "color": "#ea580c", "on": false, "group": "wiki"}

Artix forum this way

{"name": "Artix",        "type": "ddg",       "url": "https://forum.artixlinux.org/",       "color": "#c6b9d8", "on": false, "group": "wiki"}

In a future release this will be added to the default.

Uncle_Spellbinder · May 30, 2026, 10:50pm

@made-lief, I just had an update to Forum-Scout (Qt) v0.6.1. The same behavior as I had with Forum-Scout (Qt) v.0.5.0 is haoppening again, as described here: FORUM-SCOUT — A lightweight GTK3 desktop app that searches multiple Arch-based Linux forums at once - #6 by Uncle_Spellbinder

─❯ kinfo
Operating System: EndeavourOS 
KDE Plasma Version: 6.6.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.26.0
Qt Version: 6.11.1
Kernel Version: 7.0.10-zen1-1-zen (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 12 × Intel® Core™ i7-8700K CPU @ 3.70GHz
Memory: 32 GiB of RAM (31.3 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti
─❯

musqz · May 31, 2026, 8:08am

Checkout v0.6.2. (QT)

@Uncle_Spellbinder Thanks for the bug report.

A question. Do you mind to create some scrots of forum-scout (qt).
I like to use them for the github readme.

Uncle_Spellbinder · May 31, 2026, 12:40pm

Awesome. Thanks!

Sure! How’s this…

musqz · May 31, 2026, 2:41pm

@Uncle_Spellbinder

Great they will do perfect for the Readme.

Uncle_Spellbinder · May 31, 2026, 9:00pm

All is well with Forum Scout Qt v0.6.3.

musqz · May 31, 2026, 11:05pm

Great… I hope with v0.6.4 too.

Uncle_Spellbinder · June 1, 2026, 12:00am

Forum Scout Qt v0.6.4 - No issues on my CachyOS laptop or my EndeavourOS PC. All is well.