Windows explorer and creating a filename which gets sorted /after/ the letters ?

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote:
In message , Frank Slootweg
writes:
R.Wieser wrote:
[...]

A sudden thought: there's a setting, in XP at least, that lets you choose
sort order in Explorer

Ah. I forgot about that one too. I disabled it ages ago. Not funny when
scrolling thru a list of names (remembering the first letter of a document
but not sure of the rest) and they appear to be unsorted. :-((

That's why I still also use the plain old 'dir' in a Command Prompt
window, i.e.

dir letter*

and Bob's your uncle.

FWIW, I've about 3000 files in my home directory and by using '*' and
'?' wildcards in a 'dir' command, it's trivial to find a file if I only
know/remember part of the filename.

For example

dir *Clio*

gives me all the information files about my car, and

dir *142*

gives me all the files related to a specific laptop of ours (HP Pavilion
15-p142nd).

In my home directory, I'm actually *not* using sub-directories [1],
because it's easier to find a file with the dir-method, than to try to
remember in which sub-directory a file might be. (Yes, I could use
sub-directories and a recursive dir command (/s), but I just don't
bother.)

N.B. This doesn't mean I don't use File Explorer to access files,
it's just an extra method to find (the names of) files.

[1] Well, I do have some sub-directories, but not many.

Have you actually _tried_ the "Everything" utility?

No, I haven't. I didn't know I was supposed to try it! :-)

But seriously, sofar I haven't had a need for the reasons I gave, but
I'm always in for pointers to potentially useful utilities. I didn't see
a mention of the "Everything" utility in this thread, so if you could
give me/us a pointer/URL, that would be nice.

That's _very_ quick,
works on part strings (including two or more parts), and looks in
multiple directories. I used to use dir (including with wildcards, /s,
etc.) a lot, but haven't since I installed Everything.

In message , Frank Slootweg
writes:
"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote:
[]
Have you actually _tried_ the "Everything" utility?

No, I haven't. I didn't know I was supposed to try it! :-)

Do give it a go.

But seriously, sofar I haven't had a need for the reasons I gave, but
I'm always in for pointers to potentially useful utilities. I didn't see
a mention of the "Everything" utility in this thread, so if you could
give me/us a pointer/URL, that would be nice.

That's _very_ quick,
works on part strings (including two or more parts), and looks in
multiple directories. I used to use dir (including with wildcards, /s,
etc.) a lot, but haven't since I installed Everything.

https://www.voidtools.com/

It really is fast: searches as you type each character. (Or, to be more
accurate, it filters as you type; it starts with a list of all the files
on your system.) I've usually seen (in its window) the file I'm looking
for before I've finished typing.

The _first_ run may take a minute. But after that it's amazingly fast.
For example, I've got nothing in the search box now, and it's telling me
it's ready to look through my 403,109 objects. If I type b into the box,
that changed to 175,962 in well under half a second (things that have a
b in the name).

I think it only works - or at its fast speed, anyway - on NTFS, or at
least not on FAT, volumes.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

More people watch live theatre every year than Premier League football
matches. - Libby Purves, RT 2017/9/30-10/6

"Frank Slootweg" wrote

| Have you actually _tried_ the "Everything" utility?
|
| No, I haven't. I didn't know I was supposed to try it! :-)
|

Some things seem to congeal their own religion. "Everything"
is one of them. Malwarebytes is another. I like Agent Ransack.
Then, of course, there's the ultimate have-to: "What do you
mean you can't read docx?"

Agent Ransack puts a context menu in Explorer, is extremely
fast, and doesn't index. As far as I know, that's the main
difference between the two: Everything indexes and has a
confusing name. AR doesn't.

Jeff,

; Requires a ReBoot
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Input Method]
"EnableHexNumpad"="1"

That did the trick (before that entering letters while ALT was pressed did
just activate the linked menu items).

Using THE NUMERIC KEYPAD, I can enter any Unicode glyph; see:

As the "is that so?" guy I am (sorry :-) ) the next thing I did was to try
the normal keyboards digits. And for some reason that worked fine too ...

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote:
In message , Frank Slootweg
writes:
"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote:
[]
Have you actually _tried_ the "Everything" utility?

No, I haven't. I didn't know I was supposed to try it! :-)

Do give it a go.

But seriously, sofar I haven't had a need for the reasons I gave, but
I'm always in for pointers to potentially useful utilities. I didn't see
a mention of the "Everything" utility in this thread, so if you could
give me/us a pointer/URL, that would be nice.

That's _very_ quick,
works on part strings (including two or more parts), and looks in
multiple directories. I used to use dir (including with wildcards, /s,
etc.) a lot, but haven't since I installed Everything.

https://www.voidtools.com/

It really is fast: searches as you type each character. (Or, to be more
accurate, it filters as you type; it starts with a list of all the files
on your system.) I've usually seen (in its window) the file I'm looking
for before I've finished typing.

The _first_ run may take a minute. But after that it's amazingly fast.
For example, I've got nothing in the search box now, and it's telling me
it's ready to look through my 403,109 objects. If I type b into the box,
that changed to 175,962 in well under half a second (things that have a
b in the name).

I think it only works - or at its fast speed, anyway - on NTFS, or at
least not on FAT, volumes.

Yes, indeed a nice utility and very fast. Very handy to have in one's
toolbox. Thanks for the tip and pointer.

Saw in the Help that it even has a CLI (Command Line Interface), so
what more do I want!? :-)

BTW, without anything in the search box, I did a Ctrl-A and then
right-click Delete. Is that a problem!? :-)

On 4 Oct 2019 11:23:01 GMT, Frank Slootweg
wrote:

R.Wieser wrote:
Frank,

That's why I still also use the plain old 'dir' in a Command Prompt
window, i.e.

dir letter*

and Bob's your uncle.

I know. I probably spend more time in a command console than in Windows
itself. :-)

Same here, Rudy! :-) 'Even' my newsreader (tin) is a CUI (Character/
Console UI) one and runs in a Command Prompt window. And I have Cygwin
for additional UNIX/Linux commands/tools. So who needs Windows!? GUIs
are for WIMPs! :-)

I use both the CLI and the GUI. I tend to use the CLI when I do
programmer stuff and the GUI when I do end user stuff, but the
boundary is not strict.

I do like using dir for finding files.

My favorite to locate files is "dir /s/b/p {filemask}". Added p It
/doesn't/ search in ZIP folders.

I tend to stuff the output into a file. I use batch files to
process multiple files.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

On Fri, 4 Oct 2019 12:50:45 +0100, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:

In message , Frank Slootweg
writes:
"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote:
[]
Have you actually _tried_ the "Everything" utility?

No, I haven't. I didn't know I was supposed to try it! :-)

Do give it a go.

But seriously, sofar I haven't had a need for the reasons I gave, but
I'm always in for pointers to potentially useful utilities. I didn't see
a mention of the "Everything" utility in this thread, so if you could
give me/us a pointer/URL, that would be nice.

That's _very_ quick,
works on part strings (including two or more parts), and looks in
multiple directories. I used to use dir (including with wildcards, /s,
etc.) a lot, but haven't since I installed Everything.

https://www.voidtools.com/

It really is fast: searches as you type each character. (Or, to be more
accurate, it filters as you type; it starts with a list of all the files
on your system.) I've usually seen (in its window) the file I'm looking
for before I've finished typing.

The _first_ run may take a minute. But after that it's amazingly fast.
For example, I've got nothing in the search box now, and it's telling me
it's ready to look through my 403,109 objects. If I type b into the box,
that changed to 175,962 in well under half a second (things that have a
b in the name).

I think it only works - or at its fast speed, anyway - on NTFS, or at
least not on FAT, volumes.

No, it's equally fast on all volumes that you ask it to access, including
local and remote NTFS volumes, local and remote FAT volumes (FAT32, exFAT,
etc.), local and remote ReFS volumes, etc. Mapped drives, networked drives,
and NAS drives are also supported. Once the index/database has been built,
all of them are equally fast because the actual search doesn't access the
drives. The search is done against the index.

The difference that you're thinking of is in how Everything updates its
internal index/database. With NTFS and ReFS, it uses the USN Journal to
keep the index updated in real time. For all other disk volume types, a
periodic manual scan is required. You can schedule that in Everything's
Options dialog, on the Folders tab. The range appears to be as little as
rescanning every minute to as much as scanning once a week. In my case, my
non-NTFS volumes get scanned every morning at 3:00AM.

In message , Mayayana
writes:
"Frank Slootweg" wrote

| Have you actually _tried_ the "Everything" utility?
|
| No, I haven't. I didn't know I was supposed to try it! :-)
|

Some things seem to congeal their own religion. "Everything"
is one of them. Malwarebytes is another. I like Agent Ransack.
Then, of course, there's the ultimate have-to: "What do you
mean you can't read docx?"

Agent Ransack puts a context menu in Explorer, is extremely
fast, and doesn't index. As far as I know, that's the main
difference between the two: Everything indexes and has a
confusing name. AR doesn't.


I think they're very different beasts; Everything only searches on
filenames - it doesn't do content at all. (I'm not sure whether AR does
filenames.)

I agree Everything's name is _awkward_, as it makes it difficult to talk
about it; I don't think it's any less _confusing_ than Agent Ransack.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Science isn't about being right every time, or even most of the time. It is
about being more right over time and fixing what it got wrong.
- Scott Adams, 2015-2-2

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote

| I think they're very different beasts; Everything only searches on
| filenames - it doesn't do content at all. (I'm not sure whether AR does
| filenames.)

Oh. I didn't know that. Part of the reason I stopped using
Windows search was because it was so bad at searching
for content, which is what I do most. If I know the filename
I don't usually need to look for it. I know where I would have
put it. But I periodically need to do something like find the
article about canteloupe in my folder full of food and health
related files. So then I just right-click the folder and ask AR
to find "cantaloupe" in the file content. I always save such article
as TXT rather than HTML or DOC, keeping the collection
compact and simple.

AR does also search for file or folder names and accepts
wildcards. Though the asterisk isn't really necessary. But I've
never had occasion to test whether it can handle something
like apple*s. I only search for things like *apple or apple*,
*.txt, etc.

| I agree Everything's name is _awkward_, as it makes it difficult to talk
| about it; I don't think it's any less _confusing_ than Agent Ransack.

Agent Ransack is a unique name, even though it might
be an odd one. Everything means everything. The only worse
name would be, perhaps, "Something" or "The Other Thing":

"Have you tried Something to search for files?"

"mick" wrote

| Interesting. I guess it never occurred to me to name
| a file or folder starting with a number. I can't imagine why I would
| want to.
|
| I do it all the time both for files and folders when sorting photos.
| e.g. yearly folder named 2019, then sub folders 01 January, 02
| February. 03 March, etc.
|

But that's backward, unless you live in Europe. If
I had such a folder I'd probably call it Jan-1-19. I also
don't sort photos by date but by topic. Naming a photo
010120191 is not any better than the camera naming it
P10533492. So I'd never have a folder named Jan-1-19.
I have folders on my Graphics drive, in the Photos
folder, with names like Personal, Work, NASA pics, Roses,
etc. The image files in those folders, if I decided they were
things I wanted to keep, were also renamed with meaningful
names, like "NYC 3". If I name that for a date that I went
to NYC I'll have no idea what it means.

Occasionally I might have something with a number name,
but in general I don't. So in general, if I have something
I want at the top of the folder, I can just name it AA*.

I actually do name my website server logs. Tue10-1.
Wed10-2. Etc. Those then go into a folder named
stats Oct 2019. I guess I do that because the date
is always a secondary qualifier. The main point is that
the folder contains web server logs. Stats.

On Sat, 5 Oct 2019 02:04:18 +0100, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:

In message , Mayayana
writes:

Agent Ransack puts a context menu in Explorer, is extremely
fast, and doesn't index. As far as I know, that's the main
difference between the two: Everything indexes and has a
confusing name. AR doesn't.

I think they're very different beasts; Everything only searches on
filenames - it doesn't do content at all. (I'm not sure whether AR does
filenames.)

Of course AR can search on filenames. Why wouldn't it?

On 2019-10-04 8:40 p.m., Char Jackson wrote:
On Sat, 5 Oct 2019 02:04:18 +0100, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:

In message , Mayayana
writes:

Agent Ransack puts a context menu in Explorer, is extremely
fast, and doesn't index. As far as I know, that's the main
difference between the two: Everything indexes and has a
confusing name. AR doesn't.

I think they're very different beasts; Everything only searches on
filenames - it doesn't do content at all. (I'm not sure whether AR does
filenames.)

Of course AR can search on filenames. Why wouldn't it?


They are both excellent at what they do, I use them both according to
needs. Everything for filenames, Agent Ransack for content.

Rene


Rene

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Mayayana
writes:
"Frank Slootweg" wrote

| Have you actually _tried_ the "Everything" utility?
|
| No, I haven't. I didn't know I was supposed to try it! :-)
|

Some things seem to congeal their own religion. "Everything"
is one of them. Malwarebytes is another. I like Agent Ransack.
Then, of course, there's the ultimate have-to: "What do you
mean you can't read docx?"

Agent Ransack puts a context menu in Explorer, is extremely
fast, and doesn't index. As far as I know, that's the main
difference between the two: Everything indexes and has a
confusing name. AR doesn't.


I think they're very different beasts; Everything only searches on
filenames - it doesn't do content at all. (I'm not sure whether AR does
filenames.)

I agree Everything's name is _awkward_, as it makes it difficult to talk
about it; I don't think it's any less _confusing_ than Agent Ransack.

Agent Ransack walks the file tree, on demand.

It might take a minute or two for a filename search, depending
on the size of drives, and whether they're SSD or HDD.

Agent Ransack also has content search capability.
You can do a wildcard search, like you might in WinXP Search

filename = *.bat
content = "echo" "find all the BAT files with an echo line"

It can open a content search thread per CPU core. If you
had a 4C 8T processor, it would open eight threads,
and it could be searching inside eight 1GB text files
at the same time. This speeds up the content search,
compared to say, WinXP doing a Content Search without
any indexing being involved. When a core becomes available,
the next file needing a content search is queued up.

In the above example, it would only be queuing up .bat
files for the multi-threaded content search phase. If you
restrict the area-to-be-searched to C:\scripts, then
only a tiny section of the disk drive need be searched.

To do a content search of an entire hard drive with
Agent Ransack, takes as long as it takes to read the
entire drive. It could be I/O bound, if you have enough
cores. A large drive is going to take a couple hours.

Agent Ransack supports regex (Regular Expression)
entries for search. A search for "^fi" would return
only filenames that begin with the letters "fi". If you
leave regex switched on, you have to use escape characters
to prevent punctuation from being interpreted as regex
commands. Perhaps "\^fi" would search for any filename
containing the literal three letters "^fi". So if a
filename was "carrot^fi.txt", that would be a match.

*******

Everytning.exe is a filename search only. It is designed
to do one thing well, and that's filenames.

It reads the $MFT directly, generating a file list.
I think it was the novelty of doing that, which
spurred the developer on. It looks like salting the
filelist with timestamps and file sizes, reduces the
efficiency of this step (it takes a lot longer to
add that info, than the filename step).

myfile.txt Tuesday Oct.12 123,456 bytes

Once the initial scan is done, then at least for NTFS,
the USN Journal is used to keep track of file creations
and file deletions, and then everything.exe would amend
the file list (in real time) with the information. This
allows (within a few seconds) for newly created files
to show up in a search.

Obviously, the same things cannot be said for FAT32. FAT32
is not as feature-rich as NTFS, and the design of the
file system does not allow Everything.exe to have fresh
info about your FAT32 newly created files. You'd have to
re-scan the FAT32 volume, to refresh it.

Agent Ransack, by comparison, is file system agnostic.
Agent Ransack requires no knowledge of the
file system type. As long as a file system can provide
a findnextfile capability (tree walk), and allows reads,
Agent Ransack should be happy.

Everything.exe can find your filename in one second.
Agent Ransack can find your filename in two minutes.
Windows Search (indexing enabled) can find your filename in one second.
Windows Search allows programmatic search (I can call it
from a script!), but hardly anyone does that. I found
some code to do that, on the web. No, you won't like it.

Paul

"Paul" wrote

| Everything.exe can find your filename in one second.
| Agent Ransack can find your filename in two minutes.

You're being theatrical.

My XP C drive is using about 6 GB. I just did a search for
scrrun.dll. It fould that plus scrrun.dll.mui before I could
start counting. I then did a search for a more obscure file.
A config file for my own software that's buried a few layers
down. Since it's my own software I also have a number of
copies in my coding folders. AR found all 9 copies in what
I'd guess was slightly over 1 second. If I give it a file name
that doesn't exist it takes maybe 2 seconds to do a full
C drive search.

That's why I started using AR. It's extremely fast. It will
also look in all kinds of files. I occasionally want to search
for text in a CAB because CABs store a plain text list of
their content, so it's easy to find abcde.drv in the Windows
system file CABs. Windows search can't do that. (One thing
AR lacks that would be nice is a list of exemption folders. For
instance, on Vista+ there's no sense having it search winsxs.)

Of course it can't be so efficient with newer, ultra-bloated
systems. Nor can AR make up for bad housekeeping.
Someone who doesn't create data partitions and who
has a 2 TB C drive packed with photos they don't want,
downloads they don't need, email they never cull, and
software they don't use but don't remove, will not be
able to find things as well.

For most things I don't need AR because I know where
I put things. If I do need AR it's usually folder search.
Software installers are in Software on my "Back40" K drive.
Security articles are in Security on my "Attic" J drive.
Programming docs are either in the Code folder in the
Attic, or in Programming Info in the "Annex" D drive. My
customer list is in Work Files, in the Attic. If all else fails
I check the "Closet" I drive, where I sometimes
dump duplicates.

I also use a shell extension that mimics the old Win98
feature that allowed for custom links on the left side
in folder windows. For most things I do, a single click
brings me to the folder I want. I like to have it set up
like my cellar workshop: Everything has a place and every
cabinet has a label.

But I can see how Everything might be good for those
people who never delete a photo and name them with dates.

I used to frequent the photo newsgroup and was struck
by how many people use file organizer software. That was
a frequent topic. Most people are so disorganized and have
so little familiarity with the file system that software is
now designed to find their files. I think it started with Picasa,
presenting a non-locational list of image files. A entire extra
level of abstraction for the file system. People like
that don't even know where their files are, much less organize
them. And that's probably the majority of people. They're the
same people who talk about "work flow". They don't use their
computer so much as they use software that presents them
with a specific conceptual model of their computer.

But actually, that started many years ago with MS Word,
storing everything in the personal docs folder without asking.
When you ask these people where their tax records are they
say, "I don't know but Word knows". Their photos of last
Summer at the lake? Who knows?! "Photoshop knows where
they are. That's all that matters.". Backup? Who knows.
"Aconite handles that." Or, increasingly, it's
all online anyway, at someplace like Google Docs or Adobe
CS web storage. So their computer is really just a kiosk
interface to services. It gets further and further away from
actually creating and managing files, with people paying for
layer upon layer of training wheels to allow them to actually
use their computer productively.

In article , Mayayana
wrote:

I used to frequent the photo newsgroup and was struck
by how many people use file organizer software. That was
a frequent topic. Most people are so disorganized and have
so little familiarity with the file system that software is
now designed to find their files. I think it started with Picasa,
presenting a non-locational list of image files. A entire extra
level of abstraction for the file system. People like
that don't even know where their files are, much less organize
them. And that's probably the majority of people. They're the
same people who talk about "work flow". They don't use their
computer so much as they use software that presents them
with a specific conceptual model of their computer.

they know where their files are, it's that they don't want to manually
sort hundreds of thousands of them instead of what they really want to
do, which is create great photos, videos, etc.

But actually, that started many years ago with MS Word,
storing everything in the personal docs folder without asking.
When you ask these people where their tax records are they
say, "I don't know but Word knows". Their photos of last
Summer at the lake? Who knows?! "Photoshop knows where
they are. That's all that matters.". Backup? Who knows.
"Aconite handles that." Or, increasingly, it's
all online anyway, at someplace like Google Docs or Adobe
CS web storage. So their computer is really just a kiosk
interface to services. It gets further and further away from
actually creating and managing files, with people paying for
layer upon layer of training wheels to allow them to actually
use their computer productively.

it's not training wheels. it's using very powerful tools to make users
*more* productive because they're no longer doing grunt work.

think of it as an assistant who works incredibly fast and never gets
tired.