"Everything" is a filename search engine for Windows
voidtools.com
voidtools.com
I also use Launchy specifically for launching programs. Same instant results, though not live-indexed.
Which makes me question every single time I use the Windows default search box: How? How is one of the most fundamental features of the biggest software platform in history, made by one of the biggest companies in history, after decades, still not even close to as good as multiple basic indie replacements?
To me, when I think about how hopelessly bad popular software is (or becomes), this is the representative little example that comes to mind.
https://github.com/lin-ycv/EverythingPowerToys
https://github.com/Flow-Launcher/Flow.Launcher.Plugin.Everyt...
The worse thing is that it used to work much better in the Windows 7 era. I don't know what happened there and how they justified this launch of massive quality degradation.
I don't know why that specifically means search and even folders (a folder with nothing but text files will load so slowly it has a loading bar) are broken but it can't be a coincidence.
Everything + RipGrep is how i search files and file contents on windows.
For better or for worse, Microsoft puts all this sort of stuff in PowerToys now. It's there for people who want it.
Because then people whine about monopolies and sherlocking of the indie replacements, that's why. Anybody remember this: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/jun/08/adobe.sof... ?
First, why the example is odd / poor imo
Adobe trying to maintain as close to a monopoly as it can on a file format in order to have more control and (at least hoping to) generate more revenue through that control... threatening legal action to maintain their control? It's not a strong argument to say it's people being mad about microsoft's own monopolism, rather it just speaks to how corporations acting with hostility via formal legalistic channels harms attempts to use an at the time proprietary file format. It's actually in fact a counter argument to what you wrote.
As for my stronger feeling against your sherlocking point, I'd note that generally people aren't mad about sherlocking because someone else does something good and it should only ever be done once ever by one person or group in history.
Rather, such anger is usually stemming from when it's perceived as a deliberate undercutting or lazy copying. When some person or group was far more innovative or did far more difficult initial design work, only to now have been so undercut without recompense by uncaring predators lying in wait.
A great example being video game modding. People are rarely mad if one game is simply implementing its own version of a feature popular in mods or another game.
Far more often are they angry because a modder's unique and beloved system just got lifted 1:1, or clearly was irrelevant and had no reason to be added to the base game even if it's popular, and yet they're not even cited as an inspiration or hired/paid/etc. by the company that obviously felt it greatly improves the value of the game.
What could be more significant over the last 20 years than "search", and where does there exist a worst implementation of it in a major piece of software?
Everything really puts a spotlight on this with how simple and effective it is.
Upvoted.
Bing(o)!
ok ok, maybe it would slow things down to index shared drives? well how do you fuck up simple search on the LOCAL computer too???? I have to use powershell to do searching "gci -recurse" is built in alias for get-childitem. And it wasn't too many more lines of code to start searching the contents of word and excel files. (although this does take a lot longer, at least it works)
This is how WizTree works and why it's significantly faster than WinDirStat.
WinDirStat uses the system APIs to crawl the file system tree which results in lots of random reads and drive cache thrashing. WizTree directly reads and parses the file system data, making it an order of magnitude (Even 2+ orders of magnitude on magnetic drives!) faster. It also uncovers lots of hidden system files.
I asked Claude why Windows just can't match Everything, and this was what it spit out:
> Microsoft faces challenges in improving Windows Search to match Everything's performance:
> Backwards compatibility: They need to maintain compatibility with older Windows versions and existing features.
> Broader scope: Windows Search is designed to search not just filenames but also file contents, emails, and other data types, making it inherently more complex.
> System integration: Changing core Windows components can have wide-ranging effects on the operating system and third-party software.
But not only is "bash" not the first result, it's not even the second, third, or fourth. Between the "Best match" of "Git Bash" and the actual "bash" command is 10 web search results that I have zero interest in and have never had an interest in.
I just don't get it. "bash" is an exact string match and always the result I choose. How is "Git Bash" still considered the "Best match"?
They have played us for fools.
I've said for a long time that Everything should be incorporated into core Windows, until then, at least it is available on Windows. Other OSes don't have an equivalent.
You can have a fast indexed based search on APFS, but you'll pay for it with a very large index size, which the average user doesn't want.
The new Microsoft 365 stuff is so shiny, but the poor integration with traditional SMB shares is incredibly frustrating. We now have two split areas of documents: SMB and “The Cloud”. Nothing they offer for SharePoint/OneDrive Business/Azure gives proper integration between old and new.
Even worse, the new documents are often silo’d into specific user’s personal OneDrive which is basically undiscoverable by default. The old workflow of choosing a place to save the document early kept documents visible and rapidly shared. Now someone could be drafting a document for days before others even see it. Or they could forget to ever move it from their personal space to a team/shared space.
sigh
I’m thinking I’ll code a simple tool that creates hyperlinks to SharePoint in SMB.
This is truly incredible.
It creates a locally hosted web page that you can use to share with everyone on the network a fast file search client.
Highly recommended! Throw in an nginx reverse proxy for https support and you are off to the races.
Prevents you from having to run it on multiple machines redundantly.
I don't think the windows indexing service is utilized at all.
Other tools building an index via other methods can't do this as fast (creating the initial index and keeping it up-to-date) There is no other equivalent app outside of Windows
Thus I'm wondering whether newer FS can support this in principle, and maybe there is hope such an app can be created
Admittedly it's not voidtools fault, rather discords.
IIRC if discord thinks you are playing that game all the time, you can't use discord when you play actual games. Or discord may behave differently when a game is running vs. not.
> Does your boss check that you're not playing games on Discord during work time or something?
Oh no, I run discord at my home computer, and use the web interface at work ;)
I think the issue specifically was wanting discord to know the game that was actually running instead of an always running other mistaken game.
It's also frustratingly under-documented and, at least in my experience, suffers from poor performance. The query language is a not-quite-SQL (reminds me of WQL from WMI) and queries return very slowly. I've tried to make analytic tools for file servers using it and when I do get results they're often incomplete and/or wrong.
Microsoft sells Windows as secure/securable OS: filesystem permissions must be enforced (of course, FS ACLs are a huge part of the reason why Windows’ files-on-disk UX isn’t the best).
Yes, Microsoft could still buy it and then redistribute it as a power-toy strictly for single-user computers, but why would they do that? There’s no secret-sauce in Everything.exe - a summer intern could recreate it in a couple of weeks. Oh, and don’t forget the support costs from people who didn’t read the README and installed it on a multiuser machine and can now see the very non-Elizabethan-era file names inside innocent little Timmy’s My Documents\Homework\English\Shakespeare\ directory.
- permissions is also something you could store in the db and hide Timmy's files
- Also, install requires admin, and admin can already see Timmy's files
> but why would they do that?
Because it's an awesome productivity app
> Oh, and don’t forget the support costs
Hard to keep in mind the legendary helpful MS self help forums costing a fortune to host!
And the "few weeks intern" is just nonsense, Everything even after many years of developments still has plenty of room to improve
More likely they don't like it because it's clever hack and filesystem developers would be aghast at it - but hey, if it works 100x better than built-in search maybe it isn't that bad at all.
er. heard this somewhere before. much before.
embrace. extend. extinguish. ?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...
Not to say it doesn't work passed windows 8, just that windows became unbearable to me.
I like how 30+ year old NT architecture comes back again to solve things in ways that no other major OS has developed since then.