I'm looking for a free (and if possible opensource) tool to search through the content of PDFs.

Requirements:

• search full text of all PDFs in one folder (the PDFs are "plain text", not scans)
• show search result in the context of the lines around it
• allow special characters in search like \begin{frame}<1-> or \defbeamertemplate* without having to escape them. I'm looking for exact matches and don't need fuzzy search etc.
• works on macOS15

So far I've tried

DocFetcher

✅ search full text of all PDFs in one folder. Search index needs to be manually updated

✅ show search result in the context of the lines around it. Shows the full context including line breaks.

❌ allow special characters in search like \begin{frame}<1-> or \defbeamertemplate* without having to escape them

• searching for \begin{frame}<1-> will cause an error, searching for "\begin{frame}<1->" will find false results like begin{frame} $1
• searching for \defbeamertemplate* will give false results like \defbeamertemplate{block}

✅ works on macOS15

Recoll

✅ search full text of all PDFs in one folder. Update of search index can be automated, e.g. with a cron job

✅ show search result in the context of the lines around it. Shown unformatted context, line breaks are missing

❌ allow special characters in search like \begin{frame}<1-> or \defbeamertemplate* without having to escape them

• searching for \begin{frame}<1-> will find false results like \begin{frame} 1
• searching for \defbeamertemplate* will give false results like \defbeamertemplate{block}

✅ works on macOS15

rga

✅ search full text of all PDFs in one folder.

❌ show search result in the context of the lines around it. Only shows one line

❌ allow special characters in search like \begin{frame}<1-> or \defbeamertemplate* without having to escape them

• searching for rga \begin{frame}<1-> /path/to/my/folder does not give any matches, don't know how I would need to escape this...
• searching for rga defbeamertemplate\* /path/to/my/folder will give false results like \defbeamertemplate{block}

✅ works on macOS15