XYplorer Beta Club

If you're familiar at all with the really cool freeware "Find and Run Robot" (http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/findrun/), might XYplorer be adding that kind of capability soon, perhaps in its address bar? It'd be a bit akin to the Firefox "awesome bar", but for files and folders rather than history, or perhaps in addition to history. One nice thing about it, aside from its turbo speed (like SearchGT or FARR): it doesn't just check for the beginning letters, but various words within in the (long) file name.

Perhaps even better, though with higher overhead (but very reasonably higher), is the freeware "Everything" file finder (http://www.voidtools.com/): because it preloads the master index into memory, and then monitors the USN change journal, it's even faster than FARR. (For a quick mini-review and explanation of how it works, see http://www.freewaregenius.com/2008/11/0 ... fs-drives/.)

The find-as-fast-as-you-can-type capability is life-changing, and would make a great addition to XYplorer, I think. But I'm a new user/buyer of XYplorer, so I'm even more curious than usual as to what others would think.

Thanks for the great program, Don!

Hi and welcome to the XY forums!

The first product you mentioned (FARR) has been referred to here before by forum regulars...However, the second one was the subject of the very first post by a new forum user using similar langauge in http://www.xyplorer.com/xyfc/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=3086 and you can see what happened there...so I'd be cautious of how you approach this issue, ok?

My extreme apologies for not searching first--that's kind of an unbelievable faux pas on my part. I actually had been e-mailing Don a bit first, and he appropriately suggested I post instead on the wish list so that he doesn't need to repeat himself when others ask similar questions. But I mistook that for thinking that others hadn't brought this up before.

I certainly don't see these tools (FARR, Everything, SearchGT) as competitors to XYplorer, but rather potential complements. I just bought a license for XYplorer knowing full well about these other products, so certainly I don't see them as rivals. (For extremely lightweight or narrowly focussed users they could be, I suppose.)

FARR and Everything don't have anything like the capability of XYplorer, but they each do one thing (search for files based on subsets of the file name) and do it very well (accurately and extraordinarily quickly). But they're not file managers or Windows Explorer replacements or anything close to that.

Also, the "mini-review" I linked to gave some hints as to the methods used, which might make this capability easier to replicate.

John wrote:My extreme apologies for not searching first--that's kind of an unbelievable faux pas on my part.

Don't woory about it if that's the case...Now even though Don is the forum admin, us regulars also try and help keep things under control here when we can, so when I saw a first post by a brand new user ID that looked somewhat similar to one that caused the other "issue", you can maybe understand why I reacted as I did...had it been by someone who had been a member here for some time, the reaction would have been a bit different.

John wrote:My extreme apologies for not searching first--that's kind of an unbelievable faux pas on my part. I actually had been e-mailing Don a bit first, and he appropriately suggested I post instead on the wish list so that he doesn't need to repeat himself when others ask similar questions. But I mistook that for thinking that others hadn't brought this up before.

No problem! Everything I suggest is totally okay.

I'm currently not sure if I'm able to read the NTFS USN Change Journal - would need further research. At the moment the focus of XY is rather on making you faster (by reducing your work) than on speeding up certain computer operations. See http://www.xyplorer.com/tour/index.php?page=intro700 So I'm working on ways to automate repetitive tedious tasks. Actually I would recommend to use the time while the machine is busy for relaxation. (Isn't it the original idea of machines: they work while we sit back and watch...) Apart from that, XY's search is known to be very fast already -- not a few reviewers have called it the fastest (non-indexed) search they have ever seen.

I'm the originator of the original (notorius) thread regarding Everything. I would still love to see this implemented in XYplorer, as I think XYplorer is the best shell replacement out there. It would complete the product for me. I'd even be glad to explore how the master index works in NTFS and how you can get to it.