Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by abrookewood 1537 days ago
Everything is incredibly fast. Still blows me away that MS haven't implemented something like this in their search.
2 comments

Voidtool's Everything is one of those things I pretty much can't use a PC without. It's just stunningly useful and performant. MSFT's file search is so slow in comparison it feels almost like a malicious prank.
> so slow it feels like a malicious prank

Windows Explorer -> Sort by date

Unfathomable how someone thought that was a good idea.

What do you mean? I sort by (reverse) date almost everywhere where I look at files.
The "date" column and sort order in Explorer is a "deep state metadata inspection" kind of deal. For ordinary files this makes no difference, it's the same as Date modified, but sorting by date in a folder full of media files generally ends badly and in any case takes a long, long time until Explorer has parsed every last one of them. Explorer also seems to be rather unable to cache the results of this operation.
I am on Linux and I had to use updatedb recently and I thought, this crap is so damn slow I want to use Everything again.
Pretty sure they said it's because it doesn't support permissions, so you could see anything on your hard drive, that's why they don't support it and do indexing instead
The operating system doesn't need permissions to see anything on your hard drive and it is the operating system that is enforcing the permissions so it can filter the results afterwards. Also, an index can be stale and show files whose permissions have changed that you shouldn't be able to see so the permissions have to be checked on the search results either way.