As most of you know, one of the things that makes FARR different from some other launchers is that FARR does not index your hard drives, it searches them on demand.
There are advantages and disadvantages to this. The primary advantage is minimal memory use; the primary disadvantage is slower search for documents outside of the start menu (more on the motivation for not using indices is
here).
Those using FARR primarily as an application launcher are well served by this, but there are times when people would like to have the option of using an index for super fast search of complete hard drive contents.
Now there are quite a few plugins that let FARR interface with 3rd party search indexing tools such as Everything,Locate32,WindowsSearch:
I have long planned to add an indexed search option into FARR, and this last week I began writing some code to do this.. But i'm rethinking my approach.
There are actually a few ways to go with this:
- I could write my own custom indexing database code - lots of work but would be tightly integrated into FARR; could control memory vs disk usage tradeoffs.
- I could try to query ntfs master table data directory - search engines like Everything use NTFS data too but also use a database and more tricks; this would be faster than normal FARR search, but to what degree I don't know; would not require too much more memory use.
- I could try to interface with other search engines like the plugins above do; disadvantage is you need to install those and have them running; advantage is the power of these tools and the ease of coding
I started out thinking that I would like to avoid that last option, but I'm starting to think now that it would be the best approach.
So here is what I'm currently thinking.. I'm thinking that I will make some fairly minor changes to FARR, to allow plugins to more seamlessly do the job of replacing the normal file searching.
The
Everything SDK is best suited for a first implementation.
So I was thinking of basically providing the same functionality as the other great Everything plugins that have already been written for FARR, except that you would be able to tell FARR to basically use the plugin to do all normal file searching, rather than having to use an explicit alias to trigger the search.
For those of you who have been wanting indexing support in FARR, what do you think of this approach?
I do think what valid question is: If you have the Everything tool running, and just one click away, why not use that instead of FARR when you want to search for documents (as opposed to start menu items)..
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