So our work has a few systems in place. The abysmal SharePoint, which most people hate (other than HR) and a typical set of servers mapped to network drives on all our laptops.
My question. What is a good solution for searching on that server? Explorer search is abysmally slow and offers no option for customizing a search. Its not even that I want to search the entire server, even just 1 "project" folder within it to find a document that has the word "list" in it instead of combing through 45 folders.
This really shouldnt be hard. But our management is more concerned with getting inaccurate answers from slopbots and degrading quality of work than solutions to actual problems, so theyve never looked into this. Half the people at this place dont know what a server or win explorer even is.
I would guess a solution would have to be implemented by the IT team and not on a per-employee basis. Is it just a matter of them turning in indexing? Really I'd prefer something more robust than explorer search.
Obviously IT would have to approve it if its 3rd party.
Thank!
2 Jul 2026 15:18
There's an app called
Everything (from Void Tools), which is the best system indexing tool I've ever used. It's crazy fast. Has extensive search capabilities (including regex), integrates with Explorer well, etc, etc.
It's very flexible too - you could run it on your machine and have it index a network drive, or run it on the server and just use it there,
or setup an http server and have multiple instances of Everything point to that server and store their data there!
I run it on every machine I touch these days.
Be sure to walk through all it's options so you don't miss subtle, but useful features - like opening the folder when double-clicking on the folder name (rather than open the file).
Everything is way faster than Windows Indexing (which is on by default, it just isn't a great tool).
2 Jul 2026 16:08
Thank you much, I had heard of this but didnt know how thrustworthy it was!
2 Jul 2026 18:51
Everything is amazing. It really shouldn't be that amazing. After decades windows should be able to have a working search function. I'm just so disappointed the default icon isn't an everything bagel. The only thing I have on my laptop desktop is a shortcut to everything (with a custom bagel icon).
2 Jul 2026 20:22
Bummer, our IT blocks it because its freeware. Can't even get to the site.
2 Jul 2026 20:43
Aww, man, that blows.
Go talk to your IT folks, maybe show it to them on your laptop (of you have a personal one).
It really is a game changer.
Another option is an old school way - map a drive, open a Command Prompt, cd to the drive you want an index of. Then run: dir
. /s>dir.txt
This runs the directory command in the current directory, saying "show all files" (
. ), include ALL subdirectories too, then send the output to a file in the current directory called dir.Txt
You can then search through that file more quickly than searching directories manually.
The initial file creation may take a couple minutes (and hammer the daylights out of the file system while it's running).
Another tool is the tree command:
Tree w:\ /f > tree.txt
This will parse the w: drive, including all files, (/f) and write the output to tree.txt
This is also a searchable text file.
If you can't write to those directories, you can simply run the commands from a directory you can write to, or use paths to the output files - use this for the output file names:
%user profile%\documents\tree.txt
2 Jul 2026 22:32
You can enable filename, and even fulltext indexing on windows. It will then cause search to be much faster, and even search file contents.
Not enabled by default though.
Edit: hmmm, I actually read the post now.
Maybe you can interact with the index under the hood, via interfaces other than explorer?
2 Jul 2026 23:48
Ah I have used tree but didnt even think about writing it to text to search! Very clever. Thank you for the ideas !
I'm almost positive if i go to the team with this solution, they will instantly go bug eye and say "we can have ai do that!!!!!!!!!1!!1!1!1!" Which I really do not want. We already waste tens of thousands a month for useless slopbots that do nothing and are inaccurate, just plain dangerous for our line of work too. I think people have completely forgotten that software tools exist, not only a scam altman supercomputer subscription.
2 Jul 2026 23:51
Indexing for them is on, in explorer anyway. I don't think I can access more than that.
2 Jul 2026 23:52
Yeah I'm not allowed to create files via terminal either. Unauthorized access, even to my own desktop.
2 Jul 2026 23:58
Le sigh.
I'm all about locking down machines, I get it - social engineering and the inattentiveness of users is a real risk.
But wow (and I don't even know how you restrict the command prompt like that, wonder of they're using a third-party security tool).
Can you run those commands without output to a text file, and just copy the results? The command prompt got a lot better with like XP and lets you copy all (click on the icon in it's title bar, it should show a few commands).
3 Jul 2026 00:04
Lemmy
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