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Comment by sys_64738 | Hacker News Reader

If you're running Windows then install Everything.

Boggles the mind how Windows search basically just doesn’t work at this point compared to what you have on other operating systems.

Feels like I can’t even search for a certain file type in a folder.

Really frustrating that Apple, the only company to truly master OS search doesn’t seem that interested in making the type of OS that has files anymore.

>> Boggles the mind how Windows search basically just doesn’t work at this point

Now that you've tried Windows Search on your desktop, please allow us to help (or coerce) you to use MS Bing to search the entire world-wide-web. </sarc>

Yep, Everything is a game changer. I don't worry much about where a file is any more, I just worry about giving it a good filename. Then I will always be able to find it, wherever it is.

Be sure to set a hotkey for it. I use Ctrl+Shift+Spacebar since it didn't seem to conflict with anything else.

Of course before you can use Everything, you have to find Everything. Here's where:

https://www.voidtools.com/

Only for the record, there is also Swiftsearch:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/swiftsearch/

that uses the NTFS $MFT directly and that (if needed) is fully portable, see:

http://reboot.pro/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=609

Everything is a lovely tool, but I'm continually amazed that it should have to exist at all. Why is the Windows built-in search so atrocious? You literally cannot use it as part of a getting-anything-done-at-all workflow. And it keeps getting worse with every update? Why would I want to mix Bing search results with stuff from my filesystem?

"But he has nothing on at all," said a little child at last. "Good heavens! listen to the voice of an innocent child," said the father, and one whispered to the other what the child had said. "But he has nothing on at all," cried at last the whole people.

I agree completely with your sentiment here and it truly boggles the mind.

Thank God for Search Everything.

This has completely changed the way I use files. I rarely ever open the explorer to navigate to a folder, but instead open everything to search for a file and then instantly jump to the file location. Naming files well becomes much more important than where they are located.

Spotlight on mac. I use recoll on my Linux machine and let it update every few days. Fast local file system indexing is amazing and abstracts away a lot of file system pain. You often don't even need to name files particularly well to find what you want if you index file contents as well.

For me,

  > ls -rec . | ? name -match <substring_in_filename>

becomes muscle memory as a pwsh daily driver-type-person (=> PowerShell 7).

For simple matches against one pattern, you may prefer...

    > ls -rec . -filter *substring*`

... as filtering can be offloaded to the "provider" when Get-ChildItem (ls) knows about it.

Even if the filesystem provider doesn't handle patterns any differently from Where-Object (?), you can save the cost of hydrating FileInfo objects only to query and discard most of them.

For multiple patterns or anything that you'd need a regular expression for, Where-Object is superior!

Thanks, I'm not usually doing performance required stuff but when I write a function I always want to know the best way to feed the pipeline, I appreciate it. #snoverville

aka

  find . -iname \*<substring_in_filename>*

(=> V5 Unix from 1971, although the case insensitive -iname was never standardized)

> Naming files well becomes much more important than where they are located.

Aren't you just exchanging the location of relevant metadata from the path to the filename?

Have it pinned to my taskbar. There's also Windows PowerToys that has a quick launcher.

And if you are running Linux then fsearch is worth giving a try: https://cboxdoerfer.github.io/fsearch/

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