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by 1718627440 154 days ago
> Never in the past decade have I thought to myself, "gawrsh, I wonder where this file is on my laptop hard drive."

I do, but 80% of the time I'm able to locate it by opening the directory where I would put it. And 10% it's in the "other" directory. And since I have the shell history, in the remaining case it is still a simple search.

1 comments

I search for stuff all the time. But full disk search just never seems to solve the problems I have. Whatever keyword I’m looking for will inevitably show up in thousands of unrelated header files, Python files and JavaScript files in various node_modules directories and whatnot. Search in finder (or spotlight) is always way too noisy to actually do what I want it to do. Spending hours of cpu time to build that a useless index is deeply disrespectful.
The typical find oneliner to do a fulltext search invokes sed. sed supports regular expressions, so you can do quite a bit more than just a simple text match. And you can also invoke various filter chains on the results.