Fast File Finder for Windows is a tool for quickly finding files by name | Hacker News Reader

Fast File Finder for Windows is a tool for quickly finding files by name

blog.kowalczyk.info

67 pointsdisadvantage77 comments

Voidtools Everything is my go-to for this, if anyone was thinking "I want to know what naikrovek is using to find files by name..."

Agreed, 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.

>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

also 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.

It'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)

I'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.

I 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.

Everything is just great.

+1 for an optimistic vibe of your comment.

I 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/

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

I'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.

+1 for Everything. Fsearch is a good alternative on Linux

https://github.com/cboxdoerfer/fsearch

Everything mixed with AstroGrep is pretty much all you ever need for windows search.

DnGrep is MUCH better.

Wow! Thanks a million! This comment alone is worth all the time I've spent on HN this year :)

Thanks much!

it doesn't work without NTFS indexing or a voidtool service

How is it supposed to work without one or the other? On program load? Wouldn't that put us back to waiting for search?

I think searching from scratch is even better than waiting for windows to search.

I also use it in combination with everything toolbar

https://github.com/stnkl/EverythingToolbar

Amazing! I always wanted Everything + deeper OS integration and this fits the bill.

I 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.

It'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).

For 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

Once 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?

As of Windows 11, the situation is exactly the same.

As 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.

You 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.

BTW: Sumatra PDF by the same author is also worth checking.

Sumatra is one of the rare pieces of windows software that I miss on linux.

sumatra uses a mupdf backend. Same as zathura on linux.

Using "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.

Yes, 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.

I think 'find ./ -iname file' does the same on Linux?

My 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.

Using globbing, this can still be done without learning find's syntax.

or `gci -rec` in powershell

Everything has es CLI tool that searches instantly.

I'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.

development is slow but the dev is reachable and the tool does its job https://www.listary.com/

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/run

It’s open source so you could try suggesting or adding features.

PowerToys 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.

weird, I use it a lot and it always seems super snappy for me

Best one I've found is https://keypirinha.com/ which can be expanded via Python plugins (if I remember correctly). It also have Everything integration.

The closed source core of that tool really makes me go "hmm". It's free, so does that mean my searches are being monetised somehow?

I quite like keypirinha https://keypirinha.com

What do y’all like for searching by file contents? For Windows and Linux?

git grep is the best option, in my view

if you want to go beyond, advanced stuff like elastic search might be necessary, though

For source code specifically: ggreer's silver searcher: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

ripgrep 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.

I 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

Recoll 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.

There are great CLI tools already in this thread, but for some of my side-gig work I'm searching large piles of PDFs, docs formats, and ePubs with a GUI word processor open and need to reference the source by page/graf number. For those I use DocFetcher[1], a quirky and intermittently updated Java app that indexes file contents and provides rudimentary relevance searching along with regex. I index my docs, put the database it generates into a read-only shared directory, and point systems across OSs at that db so I can search quickly regardless of which box (or where) I'm working from, or can toss the app, db, and docs onto a thumbdrive for portability.

There's a commercial version that prioritized bugfixes, making the free and open version less attractive than it used to be. But it's still one of the better tools for the job when you want more than a grep-equivalent.

[1] http://docfetcher.sourceforge.net/en/index.html

Interesting.

At my previous job I created something similar for a recruitment sister company. They had a ton of CV's in all kinds of formats (Word, Excel, PDF, rtf, plain text etc). I used Lucene.NET to do the indexing.

Both companies no longer exist and I've needed to find some text in docs of my own. If I have a bit of time I could recreate the app pretty easily.

On Windows I use Agent Ransack. I don’t know if it’s the best but it works well and predictably. Unlike the built in search of Windows where I still don’t understand how to reliably search for something

I have used this too and found it to work well. I think they shot themselves in the foot with the name they chose for the program, though.

These days I usually open the folder in VSCode and hope.

rga

It works both on Windows and Linux and can be pretty fast.

https://github.com/phiresky/ripgrep-all

I wonder if anybody else remembers Google Desktop?

Yes! An amazing piece of software.

My tool of choice:

https://github.com/sharkdp/fd

Any Unix (including OSX) has "find" on the command line.

FYI mlocate works on Windows.

Never had a PC without locate updated and grep

DIR /b /s

My go to for this is Agent Ransack.

I'm using Listary. Very good.

locate32 already does this just fine, been using it for years

fascinating. Primarily use forfiles.exe or where.exe. Pwsh's get-childitem is similarly as fast

Why 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.

They 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.

It seems incredibly weird to me that the start menu search can't do basic stuff like launch browser bookmarks.

a) ISVs

b) anti-monopoly lawsuits

TL;DR: for every QoL feature Apple/Google would be praised, M$ shitheads would be shown their place.

Neither of those factor into MS product decisions much any more.

It's hard to change after two decades of.

I believe that all of these companies have some smart employees who are capable of tasteful design and who know about real problems with their products but who are screwed over by layers of self-serving bureaucracy. The project manager for some dumb feature in some corner of the OS wants to ensure their project is successful so they get a good review: that's often their key motivation. They're not as incentivized to expend engineering hours from their team and try and coordinate with 5 other teams to get something cool done.

When it comes to building good stuff, having a powerful central figure like a Steve Jobs who can just murder bad features and force the implementation of good features is probably one of the best things a company can have.

Seems having one capable dictator who keeps things together is really important. Same for Linux. I can't imagine it could have succeeded without Linus having the last word.

The default search tool from the Microsoft file explorer is an embarassment. Routinely doesn't find files that are there. No positive indication of when the search is actually finished. Wack advanced search syntax that I can't bother to learn. I could go on, but the things I have already listed are more than enough.

The search tool on Windows XP with the animated dog was 100x better than what they have there now. I usually just go with "dir" redirected to a file when I really need to find something now. Yet another example of "upgrades" being actively worse than what came before it.

Maybe it due to language

but when I want to open downloaded folder and search for it, then the first entry on the list is "remove downloaded maps" that I never/once used meanwhile 2nd option is the one that I always use, yet its still #2...

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