Comment by DaiPlusPlus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DaiPlusPlus | Hacker News Reader

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When I was at Microsoft I already knew the answer but asked around - just to be sure - and the reason is…. *drumroll* …It bypasses NTFS ACLs (because it works by indexing the raw MFT)

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.

This seems like a weak excuse, the same problem exists on UNIX, but slocate solves it well enough. The slocate solution is to build the index and record permission and ownership, then it can restrict output to entries you have permission to see at query time.

That's a poor excuse:

- 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

Eh, it's easy to work around: run as a system service, and filter results when returning to client that queried it.

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.

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