I'm interested for the same reasons - I can't hold much of an image in my head for very long, and being able to persist what I can imagine so I can examine it in detail with my actual eyes would be extremely useful.
For younger readers, or those who prefer a lighter reader, Dawkins "The Greatest Show On Earth" covers similar material in a more accessible (if less rigorous) manner. I forgot to mention it in my own recommendations, but it is one of the books I recommend at every opportunity.
* Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by K. Anders Ericsson
Much of our upbringing and education is underpinned by the assumption that "talent" is a real thing. Peak dismantles that assumption pretty thoroughly. The implications are far-reaching and I recommend it to everyone.
I like Listary - I haven't used Everything to compare, but I'm aware that they're similar.
For text file contents I'm a huge advocate for ripgrep , and for metadata...to be honest I don't have a great solution, so I'll be keeping an eye on the recommendations here.
School libraries working to support an established curriculum? This was totally normal in my high school - the texts that would be studied by a particular grade were stable for several years at a time, so they would acquire enough copies for 2 classes (60 students).
The first computer I used had Windows 3.1, so I'm not sure if I "grew up with" XP.... but no, it looks super dated to me. The icons are OK, the rest of Luna is fairly ugly.
There might be something to your theory, though - I think the Windows 2000 design still looks pretty good, although the colour palette is broadly too dark and saturated by modern standards. Perhaps we just get attached to the systems we remember liking.
Grep might be fine 99% of the time, but there's no reason to not drop a ripgrep binary on every machine I use regularly.
Ripgrep is faster across the board and has better defaults for working in Git repositories. Since I'm working with a large codebase managed in Git, it's a no-brainer.