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Comment by hiAndrewQuinn | Hacker News Reader

Much better to install PowerToys and hit Alt+Enter to find whatever exe you need. And if you're hunting down a specific file - install Everything, then Alt+Enter -> Everything -> search to your heart's content.

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Speaking of PowerToys, does anybody know of similar generic useful tools for Windows? I know that a lot of such apps exist for macOS, but I haven't found many for Windows.

There's Monitorian to change external screen brightness, eartrumpet to give a better audio settings experience in your tray and AutomaticDarkMode to change your system theme based on some conditions (such as time). These are the utilities I always install. Apart from that I use ExplorerPatcher because win11 took a big step back in the start menu and task bar flyouts.

Thanks!

Add in flowlauncher and it becomes even more useful.

Looks slick! https://github.com/Flow-Launcher/Flow.Launcher

Do you know if it does anything like what Everything does re/ tapping into Windows's underlying file database?

Looks like there’s an Everything plugin https://github.com/Flow-Launcher/Flow.Launcher#everything-pl...

The best is https://fluentsearch.net/ that supports on screen keywords search as well as a powerful launcher and file indexer. For screen search it supports UIA as well as image/text based on OCR like search. It is the best and more accurate than win-vind.

PowerToys Run is even slower than the Windows start menu. And I have disabled a half of the plugins including file and folder search.

I find it to be much, much faster. Not sure what might be the difference between our experiences here. I basically dont open the windows menu bar anymore, especially since the powertoys run bar has a shutdown keyword too.

Confirming the other comment - I've always found it to be much faster than the start menu, on every corporate issued ThinkPad I've used in the last year (3). Maybe something is weird on your machine.

Might want to reinstall. Mine was also sluggish on the first installation but afterwards run swimmingly

> And if you're hunting down a specific file - install Everything, then Alt+Enter -> Everything -> search to your heart's content.

Imagine your operating system's search is so bad that you allow a closed source app to hook the entire file api

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