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Comment by naikrovek | Hacker News Reader

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..."

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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.

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.

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.

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

https://github.com/cboxdoerfer/fsearch

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).

Everything is just great.

+1 for an optimistic vibe of your comment.

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

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.

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