Basically I want the search box in GNOME to search all my files by name but I don’t care about searching inside them or their metadata. Can I enable only that part?
Yep, that’s what I use currently but I want to use it inside the GNOME search bar that opens up when I press the Super key instead of having to open up Files.
I tested this on my system, and interesting enough, when I search for a keyword which is only within a text file, but not in its name, the global search doesn’t bring back any result, as opposed to a similar search in Files. I’m on Fedora 39, GNOME 45.5.
Maybe it’s dependent on some config file.
The GNOME Shell search box is not directly provided by Tracker. It’s provided by multiple “search providers” which can do basically anything, and just need to implement the Search Provider API.
The filename search in a stock GNOME install comes from the org.gnome.Nautilus provider, which is provided by Files aka Nautilus. So whatever behaviour you are after, is probably somehow related to functionality in Nautilus.
if you want to play around with search providers on your system, you might be interested in this example CLI tool - it uses the same API that GNOME Shell is using to fetch search results