10 ms·
Fast File Finder for Windows is a tool for quickly finding files by name
- naikrovek 5y agoVoidtools Everything is my go-to for this, if anyone was thinking "I want to know what naikrovek is using to find files by name..."
- majkinetor 5y agoFor cli use es.exe If you install via chocolatey, it installs both tools and makes es available on the PATH (I maintain this package): cinst everything Then you can use it in CLI such as: es foo
- eigenvalue 5y agoAgreed, I use Everything at least 10 times a day. Not only are searches instantaneous, but it doesn't even need to use a lot of time/compute to build the index because its using the built-in NTFS index. Why Microsoft doesn't expose a similar search tool is beyond confusing to me.
- rasz 5y ago>I believe what you’re doing is describing something that might be considered an entire doctoral research project in _insert whatever_ as “extremely simple” somewhat combatively. https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362 also https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1487228574608211969 https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1487228574608211969 "Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale" aka Nobody at Microsoft is able to do more than one thing at a time anymore.
- agumonkey 5y agoIt's totally absurd to develop the foundation for such a massively fast and useful tool yet have horrendous search features in your graphical user shell. Searching is a human right (only half joking)
- listenallyall 5y agoI've made the same comment before -- Everything might be the best piece of Windows software ever written. And it still blows my mind that MS hasn't purchased it for $10 million and made it an official part of Windows.
- jodrellblank 5y agoI don't know, but Everything uses the NTFS index and there isn't always one (e.g. REFS). To do its work, Everything needs admin rights and scrapes every file, where Windows Explorer has to respect file and folder permissions to determine what you can and can't see. Windows' search will also try and show you files in offline files caches, OneDrive caches, etc. without showing the real path, Everything is happy to show you "copies" of things in the real paths even if they're not human readable. Windows' search integrates with Windows Server and is able to query a fileserver to use the server's index and show the results locally. Windows' search has plugins for filetype handlers such as Office and PDF to search file contents. Windows' search all to often seems to try and track most recently used things, Everything doesn't. Windows has hooks for displaying files which have been moved to archive storage in an enterprise (like it does for OneDrive cloud files) and showing them as if they were present, pulled from archive storage when accessed. The right people and incentives could surely make the search a lot better than it is now. 'Everything' is amazing.
- J_cst 5y agoEverything is just great.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago+1 for an optimistic vibe of your comment.
- knight17 5y agoI am also a frequent user of Everything. If you are on Windows definitely give it a go. It is similar to the tool in this post but much more feature-rich. https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/ https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/ You can load it with the following bookmarks to explore and filter (e.g., see all 4K files in your system, or in a directory) your files in a nice way: https://www.voidtools.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4239 https://www.voidtools.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4239
- Sebguer 5y agoI've been using Everything for like a decade at this point and I'd never really experimented with anything beyond the laziest search, but these bookmarks are awesome! Thanks for sharing.
- sixothree 5y agoEverything mixed with AstroGrep is pretty much all you ever need for windows search.
- majkinetor 5y agoDnGrep is MUCH better.
- Barrin92 5y ago+1 for Everything. Fsearch is a good alternative on Linux https://github.com/cboxdoerfer/fsearch https://github.com/cboxdoerfer/fsearch
- jokoon 5y agoit doesn't work without NTFS indexing or a voidtool service
- artificialLimbs 5y agoHow is it supposed to work without one or the other? On program load? Wouldn't that put us back to waiting for search?
- jokoon 5y agoI think searching from scratch is even better than waiting for windows to search.
- NicoJuicy 5y agoI also use it in combination with everything toolbar https://github.com/stnkl/EverythingToolbar https://github.com/stnkl/EverythingToolbar
- adamscybot 5y agoAmazing! I always wanted Everything + deeper OS integration and this fits the bill.
- artificialLimbs 5y agoI put Everything on someone's computer any time they're hunting for a file in Windows and can't find it, which turns out to be quite a bit. Another killer feature is that it also indexes mapped drives.
- animal531 5y agoIt's ridiculous how good it is compared to normal search, it's on my must install immediately list (along with other handy tools like 7zip etc).
- desktopninja 5y agofascinating. Primarily use forfiles.exe or where.exe. Pwsh's get-childitem is similarly as fast
- civilized 5y agoWhy doesn't Microsoft do this themselves? They've larded up Windows with tons of worthless crap, so clearly they have a lot of time of their hands. Why not give the user something useful for once, something that OS X users have had for decades? Is the company full of morons, or do they just not see what's in it for them? That is, why bother helping the user if it won't necessarily make them $$$? Sad as they are, I find these little details fascinating. They really show how unimaginative and short-term oriented giant public tech companies often are. Apple ruining the MBP in 2016, only to walk back pretty much everything they did 6 years later, is another great example.
- justsomehnguy 5y agoa) ISVs b) anti-monopoly lawsuits TL;DR: for every QoL feature Apple/Google would be praised, M$ shitheads would be shown their place.
- ComputerGuru 5y agoNeither of those factor into MS product decisions much any more.
- justsomehnguy 5y agoIt's hard to change after two decades of.
- 0x008 5y agoThey must think that this way they will make more money. In the end for them it is not about generating a good incentive for people to stay with windows, it is just about not giving them enough incentive to leave. And - given that most people who use windows have no alternatives - the bar is very low.
- DanTheManPR 5y agoIt seems incredibly weird to me that the start menu search can't do basic stuff like launch browser bookmarks.
- jakub_g 5y agoBTW: Sumatra PDF by the same author is also worth checking.
- auxym 5y agoSumatra is one of the rare pieces of windows software that I miss on linux.
- spikengineer 5y agosumatra uses a mupdf backend. Same as zathura on linux.
- adhesive_wombat 5y agoI'm looking for a working alternative to Albert or Rofi in Windows. It seems there are several dead projects like Cerebro that integrate with tools like Everything. Crucially, it must be extensible so I can add domain specific plugins. Ideally I'd be able to reuse code between Windows and Linux, but I don't see any cross platform ones, so maybe it'll need shims.
- YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y agodevelopment is slow but the dev is reachable and the tool does its job https://www.listary.com/ https://www.listary.com/
- avtar 5y agohttps://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/run https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/run It’s open source so you could try suggesting or adding features.
- jamesgeck0 5y agoPowerToys Run is a great idea with some awful jank. One of the best things about Alfred is that it appears instantly when I hit the shortcut, every time. PowerToys Run just... don't appear sometimes. Or appears several seconds late.
- keithnz 5y agoweird, I use it a lot and it always seems super snappy for me
- toastercat 5y agoBest one I've found is https://keypirinha.com/ https://keypirinha.com/ which can be expanded via Python plugins (if I remember correctly). It also have Everything integration.
- adhesive_wombat 5y ago
- Scramblejams 5y agoWhat do y’all like for searching by file contents? For Windows and Linux?
- jokoon 5y agogit grep is the best option, in my view if you want to go beyond, advanced stuff like elastic search might be necessary, though
- sdrinf 5y agoFor source code specifically: ggreer's silver searcher: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher
- GrantZvolsky 5y agoripgrep has been a godsend for my bash workflow. It feels impossibly fast when used on git repositories. The caveat is that by default it omits .gitignored files, hidden files/directories, and binary files.
- invalidator 5y agoI use recoll[1] as my main homedir index/search tool. It supports many document formats and digs recursively into archives. It has a no-nonsense GUI, and a simple CLI interface. The search syntax is easy and flexible, allowing searches by many kinds of metadata, in addition to simple full-text search. It's slow with my collection of ~2.8 million files and the index on spinning rust, but it's thorough and reliable. For email, I store everything in mboxes, and index/search with Mairix[2]. It's wickedly fast and the search capabilities make gmail blush. I use a little script to search: if mairix -o $$ $*; then mutt -e 'set quit=yes' -f ~/Mail/$$ fi rm ~/Mail/$$ It's very common that I want to find an email from sometime in the last month, so my most common search is something like: search d:1m- alice And I'll have an instant view of all emails from alice in the last month. [1] https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/ [2] https://github.com/rc0/mairix
- Too 5y agoRecoll is the best i found for pdfs on linux. Recommended. For everything else that's just plain text, ripgrep or ctrl+shift+f in the IDE.
- teknopaul 5y agoFYI mlocate works on Windows. Never had a PC without locate updated and grep
- morninglight 5y agoUsing "dir" on the Windows command line can do a simple search. It is on every Windows machine and easy to use. It is not the fastest but it can be useful. Amazing how few people know how to use it. Just type "help dir" from the Windows command line.
- billforsternz 5y agoYes, dir /s file Looks for the file in the current directory and all subdirectories. I wish Unix ls could do the same thing as easily. MS-DOS rules forever I guess.
- snoopen 5y agoI think 'find ./ -iname file' does the same on Linux?
- billforsternz 5y agoMy comment was light-hearted and I was surprised it was downvoted. I mean obviously Unix can so this simple function, but the ls command can't I don't think, which is my only claim. And many people don't realise that the MS-DOS equivalent to ls can do it.
- Tajnymag 5y agoUsing globbing, this can still be done without learning find's syntax.
- auxym 5y agoor `gci -rec` in powershell
- majkinetor 5y agoEverything has es CLI tool that searches instantly.
- chernevik 5y agoAny Unix (including OSX) has "find" on the command line.
- GrantZvolsky 5y agoOnce upon a time, back in the Vista days, I was looking for a file. I knew the name of the file, and I typed it into the brand new Search Pane. I waited, and waited, and waited... Until I decided to run something along the lines of `tree / > files.txt`. The tree command completed, I opened the result in Notepad, and found my file in no time, meanwhile the Search Pane was still searching. I don't have a Windows around to run the experiment in 2022, so I ask: Has Search not improved since the Vista days?
- zapt02 5y agoAs of Windows 11, the situation is exactly the same.
- justsomehnguy 5y agoAs of Windows 10 (20H2 19042.867) with disabled Cortana (integrated web search) it's actually finding files. Even finds openssl.cnf from my Git install. But this is a pretty fresh install from the last year, previous ones were not good.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoYou have to use "name:<filename>" to disable searching file contents. It boggles the mind why they eliminated the XP style search in favor of this undiscoverable version and then never improved it.
- celdon25 5y agolocate32 already does this just fine, been using it for years
- twostorytower 5y agoI wonder if anybody else remembers Google Desktop?
- aliswe 5y agoYes! An amazing piece of software.
- mickotron 5y agoDIR /b /s
- svnpenn 5y agoMy tool of choice: https://github.com/sharkdp/fd https://github.com/sharkdp/fd
- strijelac 5y agoI'm using Listary. Very good.
- heywire 5y agoMy go to for this is Agent Ransack.