Eix

eix from [Berlios] is a set of utilities for searching, diffing and updating a binary cache of your local portage-trees.

It is made to be more efficient and flexible than emerge's search functionality, comes with colorized output and helps you to more easily find the package information you need.

Installation
You can install eix using

after you have done so it is important that you first update its cache before using it.

Updating the cache
will update the local eix cache to reflect changes to the portage tree.

To spare out some typing work, you can combine this with syncing emerge:

which is shorthand to running both commands:

You will need to run either eix-update or eix-sync every time you plan to sync to keep the eix cache up-to-date.

Adding overlays to the cache
If you want to search not only portage but all the overlays, you can add them to the cache:

Searching the cache
Now that there are package entries in the cache you can search through them.

Finding more information about eix
For a quick overview about eix, you can run:

For more detailed information, you can run:

Searching for packages
Let's say we want to find package names containing kernel, we can simply do:

This will return something like:

* app-admin/eclean-kernel Available versions: (~)0.3 Homepage:           https://bitbucket.org/mgorny/eclean-kernel/ Description:        Remove outdated built kernels

Available versions: 1 Homepage:           http://www.kroah.com/lkn/ Description:        Linux Kernel in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference
 * app-doc/linux-kernel-in-a-nutshell

Available versions: 9 Homepage:           http://www.schwarzvogel.de/software-misc.shtml Description:        A collection of funny lines from the Linux kernel
 * games-misc/fortune-mod-kernelcookies

Available versions: 1.4.14 (~)1.4.14.1 (~)1.6.0 (~)1.6.1_pre1 (~)1.6.1 Homepage:           http://www.openafs.org/ Description:        The OpenAFS distributed file system kernel module
 * net-fs/openafs-kernel

Available versions: [M]2.20120215 [M](~)2.20120215-r1 Homepage:           http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/hardened/selinux/ Description:        SELinux policy for kerneloops
 * sec-policy/selinux-kerneloops

Available versions: 8.0.16 (~)8.3.6 (~)8.3.8.1 Homepage:           http://www.drbd.org Description:        mirror/replicate block-devices across a network-connection
 * sys-cluster/drbd-kernel

Available versions: 2.03.09 Homepage:           http://sources.redhat.com/cluster/wiki/ Description:        GFS kernel module
 * sys-cluster/gfs-kernel

[I] sys-kernel/genkernel Available versions: 3.4.16 (~)3.4.16.1 3.4.20 (~)3.4.21.2 (~)3.4.22.1 (~)3.4.23.1 (~)3.4.24 3.4.24_p1 (~)3.4.25.1 (~)3.4.26 (~)3.4.27 (~)3.4.28 (~)3.4.29 (~)3.4.32 (~)3.4.33.1 (~)3.4.34 (~)3.4.35 (~)3.4.36 **9999 Installed versions: 3.4.36(01:30:10 AM 07/01/2012)(crypt -cryptsetup -ibm -selinux) Homepage:           http://www.gentoo.org Description:        Gentoo automatic kernel building scripts

Found 8 matches.

If you want only installed packages, you can use -I.

[I] sys-kernel/genkernel Available versions: 3.4.16 (~)3.4.16.1 3.4.20 (~)3.4.21.2 (~)3.4.22.1 (~)3.4.23.1 (~)3.4.24 3.4.24_p1 (~)3.4.25.1 (~)3.4.26 (~)3.4.27 (~)3.4.28 (~)3.4.29 (~)3.4.32 (~)3.4.33.1 (~)3.4.34 (~)3.4.35 (~)3.4.36 **9999 Installed versions: 3.4.36(01:30:10 AM 07/01/2012)(crypt -cryptsetup -ibm -selinux) Homepage:           http://www.gentoo.org Description:        Gentoo automatic kernel building scripts

Besides searching for package names, you can also search in descriptions using -S which will give a lot more results.