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Ask HN: Best Windows file search tool?

5 points by high_byte ↗ HN
Windows search sucks. There used to be Google Desktop which found any file instantly, similarly to gmail search.

What are the best indexing tools today? and file managers in general, like explorer alternatives.

9 comments

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wexq
"Everything", https://www.voidtools.com

Fast indexing, instant search, does regex and other advanced searches.

For file managers, maybe Total Commander or One Commander.

ddingus
Second "Everything" it works, and is fast.
high_byte
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
wexq
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.

llampx
I like Listary, its a sort of Spotlight for files.
fuzzfactor
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.

DaOne256
Locate (fka Locate32). Looks like the old Windows 95/98 search tool. Supports indexing.
majkinetor
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