Find Gentoo Packages with Eix

In the beginning, we had (and still have) emerge -s or emerge -S to search for packages. While both of these methods work. I strongly prefer eix. Let's get started.

emerge -av eix
eix-sync

Now that eix is installed the cache is built, you can perform some searches.

First, let's use the -I flag to look for installed packages.

Great! You can use eix -C app-misc to browse all packages in the app-misc category, eix -c sources to get an overview of kernel sources available (-c is for compact), or just eix [application name].

Instead of running emerge --sync going forward, I recommend using eix-sync which combines syncing and updating the eix cache. You can even add this as a daily cron job to always have a current listing.