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Comment by andoando | Hacker News Reader

I never understood why file search is SOOO bad on windows (mac too). Its so damn slow and even feature wise I never figured out why it was so difficult to just search for files in this directory

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It regressed compared to Windows 10 too - I have a folder with photos, I normally have them sorted by date taken. On windows 10 I would open the folder and they were always sorted correctly the moment I opened the folder. Maybe there was a point in time at the start there the system had to sort them for the first time but ever since they were always shown correctly the second I opened the folder. On windows 11? Every single time it opens unsorted, the photos are in some random god knows what order, and literally 10 seconds(!!!!) later they suddenly move themselves to the correct position. Every single time. That's with maybe 200 photos? On a machine with 16 cores and 64GB of ram. People coding on 16kHz chips decades ago could do this faster than whatever microsoft is doing.

it's also worth mentioning that windows 10 search was a huge regression from 7 and xp.

And there really is no excuse, take a look at this indie dev blowing the default explorer out of the water: https://filepilot.tech

"Everything" is another that puts the default search to shame. I've also seen people who just have a script that pumps all new files into a txt file every so often and runs bruteforce ripgrep on it, which gives instant interactive results. It's really hard to imagine coming up with a search routine that is as slow and unreliable as what ships with mainstream OS file managers.

File search is also the fastest thing among all the 3 OS it's not even funny. Just use the Everything search app and a good file manager that can integrate Everything.

I still don't understand how search just can't file files with the string I write in the search bar on the name. Or menu items either.

Some file browsers on Linux have this problem too, and the KDE launcher had it for years (it's fixed now).

For a look into a parallel universe of what could be, check out Everything[0]. Super fast search that should be embarrassing for Microsoft.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_(software)

It's a must have for me on Windows. Now that I'm on Linux, Fsearch is a pretty good replacement.

The “Everything” application is what you want:

https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/

One of the most powerful and unique tools for windows ever.

The only thing I miss being on OSX, I hate its search.

It is quite honestly faster to start WSL then use grep or find.

You don't need wsl, just install rigrep or the powershell equivalent of find

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