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Comment by Goz3rr | Hacker News Reader

A long time ago I switched to WizTree, which does the same thing except it basically only takes ~5 seconds to do it for an entire drive.

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WizTree cheats (in a good way) and uses the NTFS MFT to find files.

Another tool "Everything" uses the same idea, to search for file names etc in an absurdly fast manner.

I miss Everything on MacOS

There is HoudahSpot. Not free though.

There's Disk Inventory X

Disk Inventory X has been a little hit or miss for me. Works OK on my two Macs (Catalina), but can’t index the whole (128GB?) drive on my wife’s MacBook Air (Mojave). Just crashes at some point.

Unexpectedly, searching the generic word `Everything` find exactly what I was looking for.

Yeah, not the most SEO friendly name.

I'm 99% sure the comment is referring to Voidtool's "Everything": https://www.voidtools.com/

It and WinDirStat are some of the first things I install on any new instance of a computer. But I may check out this fork and Whiztree for other inspiration.

I think you read the comment backwards.

The developer of WizTree also makes WizFile for instant fast file search.

https://antibody-software.com/wizfile/

Everything is incredibly fast. Still blows me away that MS haven't implemented something like this in their search.

Voidtool's Everything is one of those things I pretty much can't use a PC without. It's just stunningly useful and performant. MSFT's file search is so slow in comparison it feels almost like a malicious prank.

> so slow it feels like a malicious prank

Windows Explorer -> Sort by date

Unfathomable how someone thought that was a good idea.

What do you mean? I sort by (reverse) date almost everywhere where I look at files.

The "date" column and sort order in Explorer is a "deep state metadata inspection" kind of deal. For ordinary files this makes no difference, it's the same as Date modified, but sorting by date in a folder full of media files generally ends badly and in any case takes a long, long time until Explorer has parsed every last one of them. Explorer also seems to be rather unable to cache the results of this operation.

I am on Linux and I had to use updatedb recently and I thought, this crap is so damn slow I want to use Everything again.

Pretty sure they said it's because it doesn't support permissions, so you could see anything on your hard drive, that's why they don't support it and do indexing instead

The operating system doesn't need permissions to see anything on your hard drive and it is the operating system that is enforcing the permissions so it can filter the results afterwards. Also, an index can be stale and show files whose permissions have changed that you shouldn't be able to see so the permissions have to be checked on the search results either way.

WizTree has been my go-to for a long time

I've also been using WizTree for quite a while, but recently learned WinDirStat scans the filesystem instead of trusting the NTFS metadata because it can sometimes be incorrect(?) and is a bit tricky due to poor documentation. The WDS developer actually addressed this in AWDS's issues 4[1] and 19[2] a few years ago, and even said he's contemplating supporting the MFT but it seems he hasn't gotten around to it.

1: https://github.com/ariccio/altWinDirStat/issues/4#issuecomme... 2: https://github.com/ariccio/altWinDirStat/issues/19#issuecomm...

By using cached NTFS metadata instead of actually querying the allocation tables I presume?

Yep. Their related product wizfile uses the same trick for fast search by filename/path. Obviously doesn't work for non-local file locations.

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