Ask HN: Best Windows file search tool?
9 comments
"Everything", https://www.voidtools.com
Fast indexing, instant search, does regex and other advanced searches.
For file managers, maybe Total Commander or One Commander.
Fast indexing, instant search, does regex and other advanced searches.
For file managers, maybe Total Commander or One Commander.
Works great! exactly what I needed. Not only I found lost files easily, my Windows is installed on 256GB drive so I had to find out what's taking up space. Used to take so long to search in explorer something like size:>1gb, now I found ~40gb I could probably delete, about ~20gb of which is just cache stuff
Yeah, Everything is fantastic.
I've mapped Win+Alt+Space to activate Everything (Settings > Keyboard), then set "Clear Window on Execute" (Settings > General) to on.
Now a simple keypress gets me search, I can quickly navigate using cursor keys and on selection it closes the search window.
If I'm looking for something fancier I can use the keyboard shortcut, then Ctrl+R to enable Regex search and so on.
Fast and simple.
I've mapped Win+Alt+Space to activate Everything (Settings > Keyboard), then set "Clear Window on Execute" (Settings > General) to on.
Now a simple keypress gets me search, I can quickly navigate using cursor keys and on selection it closes the search window.
If I'm looking for something fancier I can use the keyboard shortcut, then Ctrl+R to enable Regex search and so on.
Fast and simple.
Second "Everything" it works, and is fast.
I like Listary, its a sort of Spotlight for files.
"Everything Search".
The reason for indexing in Windows was so that searching NTFS volumes using Windows NTx.x didn't seem that much slower than searching FAT32 volumes when using W9x where there was no need for indexing.
And that was on hardware which was orders of magnitude slower, both processor and HDD.
People probably haven't benchmarked this on 21st century hardware in a while.
It can be amazing what a single 2GHz core can do when you give it a chance.
And that was on hardware which was orders of magnitude slower, both processor and HDD.
People probably haven't benchmarked this on 21st century hardware in a while.
It can be amazing what a single 2GHz core can do when you give it a chance.
Locate (fka Locate32).
Looks like the old Windows 95/98 search tool. Supports indexing.
Everything is the best and even linux tools can't compare. It also has great command line tools es.exe.
Double Commander is the best FOSS file manager on Windows (TC clone) and other OSes.
You can install/update all via chocolatey: cinst everything doublecmd
Double Commander is the best FOSS file manager on Windows (TC clone) and other OSes.
You can install/update all via chocolatey: cinst everything doublecmd
What are the best indexing tools today? and file managers in general, like explorer alternatives.