Do your 15 licenses for file managers include XYplorer? And if so, how do you rate its search functions against those, given that it's a file manager built on a file-finder, rather than the other way round?
-rjbull
I'm feeling quite embarrassed now (rather than being simply embarrassed)...
-Darwin
But c'est la vie! Yes, I have a lifetime licence for XYPlorer and love it. It's search feature is very fine, but I would rate it between SearchGT and FileLocator Pro based on speed AND based on feature set
I'll take it that here we're primarily talking features as an information finder, rather than a plain file finder or file manager.
- the differences would be that if speed were determining the criteria, SearchGT would win, whereas on feature set FL Pro would win.
I seem to remember DonL saying that SearchGT was particularly fast at "first time" searches, but that once the Windows cache had been loaded, there wasn't much in it.
However, if you're taking BOTH into account, XYPlorer heads the list! It's quicker than FL Pro and DOES do file content searching. However, I've never really been able to get it to work - all the hits that I get contain my search term in their titles and I KNOW that there are many thousands of files that contain the search term in their content but not in their titles. Anyway, just did such a regular "title" search and it took 79 seconds on 80 GB of data (114,000 files in 9000 folders). Content searches take A LONG TIME. In fact, FL Pro handles this kind of search much more quickly.
Here, I suppose, it's really a case of what's the main focus of a particular application. I found content search less good in XYplorer than I'm used to. You can use its Ctrl-Q Quick View feature on the hits, but it's not so obvious where the hits are in the file. If you do a contents search with Total Commander and ask it to view the files it's found, you can just press F3 and it will do a "find again" search on the text you originally asked it to search for. That's a nice touch, and one I didn't immediately see in XYplorer (somebody correct me if I'm wrong). Wish list - an option to colourise the hit terms... Also, I find TC more keyboard-friendly than XYplorer, but I find myself using the latter more for unindexed searches of the network.
I don't have FL Pro, in part because I briefly looked at Agent Ransack and found it wouldn't work properly on the computer I use at work owing to restrictions in force at the time. Maybe I should take another look. BareGrepPro is
wonderful for grep with or without regexp searches and shows you the text in a window, but I would often prefer Boolean searching. The only (Windows) program that has Boolean searching that I have at present is
WanyWord (freeware), but I don't much like the syntax and I want better options for proximity searching, like (at least) that terms should be within one to "n" lines of each other. Asking they should be within so many
words of each other would doubtless slow things down too much for unindexed searches.
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But FWIW: