fd takes less time, would recommend

On Windows, the fastest way seems to use WizTree to scan the whole hard drive (Takes only a couple seconds to scan an SSD, and even my 2 TB spinning HD with >900,000 files takes less than 15 seconds) and then search the results for the filename.

Haven't tried this one, thanks. There's also Everything [0] which is usually my favorite search for Windows. Fast and supports regex.

[0] https://www.voidtools.com/

Everything search is incredible, for me it serves nearly instant searches for 15TB+ of data without any trouble. I think the secret sauce is a background service which continuously updates the file index.

I also like WinDirStat a lot for Windows file management, which is not really for search but gives a great view of disk usage.

> I think the secret sauce is a background service which continuously updates the file index

Actually, the secret sauce to both WizTree's and Everything's speed is the NTFS Master File Table (MFT) [1].

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/maste...

Is there an open source analog of voidtools Everything yet?

Have never been able to find anything.

I've seen flow launcher recommended but haven't personally tried it out yet

Thanks for the suggestion.

Probably worth benchmarking against fzf/ripgrep when I can find the time.

There's this, which I haven't tried: https://github.com/ChrisS85/FastFileSearch

SwiftSearch is excellent and uses the same tech: https://sourceforge.net/projects/swiftsearch/

So why do the stock implementations suck?

mlocate/plocate (for locate and updatedb) are also nice

Even if the db is not up to date, it's likely faster to update/search than rely on find

Lost my ability to edit, but here's a link to Albert: https://albertlauncher.github.io/

The demonstrations there confirm searching... and way more than I can do justice here

Albert is pretty good.

I also catfish https://launchpad.net/catfish-search which is excellent. Also can search within text files.

Are either of you concerned about giving permissions to almost everything? I think that was why I uninstalled Albert.

I am not sure what special permissions you are talking about that Albert gets? Just like any other software, it can do whatever the user can do. As far as I understand it doesn't "phone home" or anything with my data. And doesn't really delete or move files in any way.

A bit, I'll admit I haven't audited it as much as I should -- are you aware of anything in particular?

I install it through the Fedora repositories and only use the bundled extensions, so I don't worry too much about it