Farr is not very responsive when it is searching

[kartal]

When farr is searching directories Farr becomes very unresponsive and most of the times "Esc" cannot even stop the search. And I would find myself waiting Farr to finish the search next 1 min which is waste of time pretty much. This is very visible during a "deep search" when Farr cannot place the keyword within the history and that is the time it starts directory searching. I am hoping that there would be some improvement at some point regarding this issue.

[mouser]

Yes i will try to fix this in the near future with a better use of threads.

[kartal]

I am glad that you are aware of the problem as well.

[mouser]

There are really two issues here:
1) the minor issue, which is that FARR's user interface should be more responsive even while searching deep directories.  The problem is caused by unsophisticated use of multithreading that gets hung up waiting for the operating system to load directory information when it is out of the OS cache.
2) the larger issue, which is that when searching giant directories, for example if you have FARR to search your entire hd instead of just your start menu (the default is just start menu), then the fact that FARR does not index becomes a hindrance to use because it can take so long to live search those directories.  An index would make such searches significantly faster, but brings with it it's own problems.

I'd like to ask that we don't get into a detailed discussion of indexing and such stuff now, just because i'm not quite ready to think about it in detail -- i want to fix all my other pending issues in the next week or so and then we can talk about this again.

[kartal]

thanks for explanation mouser. What I can ask  is maybe more responsive "esc" as the first step maybe?

[macs]

I'm not too worried about indexing. What I'd like is a little more control over the search directories, so it was clear which order they were searched in and the order could easily be changed.  This would mean that the folders with the things I use most (eg. the start menu) would be searched first and show in the results quickly, other folders  (eg. my music collection) would take longer.

If FARR is then more responsive during searching I could then easily select things from the most important folders (eg. start menu) without waiting whilst it gets stuck on some of the other folders.

[TucknDar]

isn't the order just top to bottom in the list of which directories to search? Is there more to it than that? (Except tweaking search depth and scores)

[mouser]

isn't the order just top to bottom in the list of which directories to search?

Yes.

And this is important.  It means you should always put the small most likely directories at top, such as the Start Menu.

[macs]

isn't the order just top to bottom in the list of which directories to search? Is there more to it than that? (Except tweaking search depth and scores)

-TucknDar (June 24, 2008, 01:33 PM)

I guessed that was the order but it isn't clear. FARR does have the ability to add something in the middle of list of directories but it doesn't have the common "move up" "move down" buttons to change the order, so you have to delete an item and add it back in.  It is probably a case that the ordering works but a few tweaks to the user interface would make it clearer and easier to use.

[herojoker]

You can simply drag and drop the items in the list to change the order.

[jgpaiva]

I think i agree with macs, although it works in the easiest way possible, there isn't anything suggesting that the list can be reordered. Maybe the arrows up/down would make sense even though drag+drop exists.

[Armando]

In my everyday use, an index seems more and more like it would be a great complement to farr's live search.
I do use the Locate32 plugin a lot, but... there are some issues with diacriticals and it searches a bit differently.

For quick searching and launching (documents, mainly) I'd rather use farr than anything else. For advanced searching, I have X1 and Archivarius but these can't (or shouldn't) replace farr for launching.