Ask HN: Why is on-device search terrible?

Re:Ask HN: Why is on-device search terrible? by Sohcahtoa82 on Thursday January 19, 2023 @04:45PM (#34446074)

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.

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Re:Ask HN: Why is on-device search terrible? by clockwork-dev on Thursday January 19, 2023 @04:56PM (#34446202)

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/

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Re:Ask HN: Why is on-device search terrible? by rococode on Thursday January 19, 2023 @05:44PM (#34446715)

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.

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Re:Ask HN: Why is on-device search terrible? by delta_p_delta_x on Thursday January 19, 2023 @07:33PM (#34447651)

> 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...

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Re:Ask HN: Why is on-device search terrible? by hackrnusr on Thursday January 19, 2023 @09:05PM (#34448320)

Is there an open source analog of voidtools Everything yet?

Have never been able to find anything.

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Re:Ask HN: Why is on-device search terrible? by pynappo on Thursday January 19, 2023 @11:19PM (#34449213)

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

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Re:Ask HN: Why is on-device search terrible? by hackrnusr on Friday January 20, 2023 @01:21AM (#34449807)

Thanks for the suggestion.

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

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Re:Ask HN: Why is on-device search terrible? by kid64 on Friday January 20, 2023 @01:40AM (#34449904)

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/

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Re:Ask HN: Why is on-device search terrible? by yonz on Friday January 20, 2023 @10:13AM (#34454150)

So why do the stock implementations suck?

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