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Comment by RachelF | Hacker News Reader

Me too - strangely, one of the reasons I stay on Windows is Everything (https://www.voidtools.com/) - it is just so useful.

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I had Everything installed but didn't use it as much as expected. I've gravitated toward FileLocator Pro instead, which uses extremely fast metadata table searching instead of requiring an index (I don't use the Agent Ransack features).

Not a Linux expert, but out of curiosity did you try Recoll when you looked at other platforms? (https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/pages/index-recoll.htm...)

What is the pattern syntax you use most often?

Just regular fuzzy finding is the most common. For example, to attach a file instead of faffing around clicking in the open dialog, I type into fluent search(a frontend to everything) and it enters it in the current context i.e the open dialog.

It has a few other qualifiers, like big: huge: etc to search large files. Same way with time etc.

Rarely when you need it you prefix with regex: and you get everything you need.

It's very useful that both everything and fluent search integrate into explorer in that if you right click on the search result you get the same context menu as you would in explorer. Drag drop works, etc,. The issue with every other tool in every other OS is the lack of this feature. You basically have a virtual fully featured directory for every search result, simply cannot beat that.

Wait, I didn't know Everything can full search text ? is it like search preview in macOS ?

Sorry, I meant that you can fuzzy find the filenames, not the contents.

For the latter, explorer top right search bar can do it surprisingly. As for a tool with an index, recoll comes to mind.

You can use the "si:" prefix in Everything alpha to query Windows index.

https://www.voidtools.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=9793

I have some use scenario (finding backlinks in a folder containing thousands of markdown files) where this method fits perfectly and returns results instantaneously (even ripgrep takes a second or two to find all the backlinks as it doesn't use an index).

Unfortunately the text snippet showing the context that you get in explorer is not easily retrievable via Windows API. I made a suggestion [1] to the author and he seems open to implement it.

[1] https://www.voidtools.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13739

Wow, that's amazing!

Let me know how recoll works for you, if you try it. It can search within XML stuff like word docs, PDFs and can even do OCR.

I use astrogrep for searching file contents on windows, it's pretty fast. Not nearly as fast as everything but I guess that's the nature of searching full contents. Just restrict by file type and filter out node modules and it's fast enough

dngep is great. It can also use everything

The most important thing is to sort by date modified by default. Usually, the file you want is very new.

After that I mostly just use "pic:" or "path:".

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