4 ms·

What do you mean "still mostly useless"? Is there anything more usable on any other OS? I moved back to Windows a couple of years back. Spotlight is the second

by m000 4y ago

What do you mean "still mostly useless"? Is there anything more usable on any other OS? I moved back to Windows a couple of years back. Spotlight is the second thing I miss most from macOS, with the first being Preview.

mehrshad 4y ago
Microsoft's PowerToys has a great answer to Spotlight on Windows if you're so inclined to try it out. [0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/
fake-name 4y ago
Mentioned elsewhere, Everything search by voidtools: https://www.voidtools.com https://www.voidtools.com. It does funky things with monitoring some component of the NTFS filesystem to maintain a up-to-date index of every filename on your computer, and makes them searchable literally as fast as you can type. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33321000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33321000) There seems to be two kind of searching people do. Some people want a search tool that searches in documents. Some people want a search tool that searches filenames. Everything search is exclusively the second. I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've wanted to search inside documents in the last 10+ years (and for those cases, grep has worked fine, even on windows!). For some reason, searching inside documents seems to be the default for both windows and os x search, and it's super annoying.
- m000 4y ago
  > I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've wanted to search inside documents in the last 10+ years If you want to search documents you have created, I can imagine that you may not use the feature much. But e.g. for research papers, the downloaded copy rarely reflects the contents/authors, so it is really handy to be able to search the contents. > For some reason, searching inside documents seems to be the default for both windows and os x search, and it's super annoying. Weird. For me windows don't seem to search inside documents, or at least not in all documents.

by m000 4y ago

mehrshad 4y ago

Microsoft's PowerToys has a great answer to Spotlight on Windows if you're so inclined to try it out. [0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/

fake-name 4y ago

Mentioned elsewhere, Everything search by voidtools: https://www.voidtools.com https://www.voidtools.com. It does funky things with monitoring some component of the NTFS filesystem to maintain a up-to-date index of every filename on your computer, and makes them searchable literally as fast as you can type. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33321000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33321000) There seems to be two kind of searching people do. Some people want a search tool that searches in documents. Some people want a search tool that searches filenames. Everything search is exclusively the second. I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've wanted to search inside documents in the last 10+ years (and for those cases, grep has worked fine, even on windows!). For some reason, searching inside documents seems to be the default for both windows and os x search, and it's super annoying.

m000 4y ago
> I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've wanted to search inside documents in the last 10+ years If you want to search documents you have created, I can imagine that you may not use the feature much. But e.g. for research papers, the downloaded copy rarely reflects the contents/authors, so it is really handy to be able to search the contents. > For some reason, searching inside documents seems to be the default for both windows and os x search, and it's super annoying. Weird. For me windows don't seem to search inside documents, or at least not in all documents.