whenever I desperately need a file that was swallowed up by the way I sort things on my computer (random) I just run CMD.EXE /K DIR /S /A /B C:\filename.doc

Always finds it.

EDIT: Since people seem to like it, here is what I did on one machine where I need it a lot:

Save a text file named search.bat to the desktop with this content:

@ECHO OFF
SET /P FILENAME=Filename:
DIR /S /A /B C:\%FILENAME%
PAUSE

You then have a search utility you can double click on. You can even go so far as to make a 2 file combination that creates a cache of all files. This way you can find files within a second.

EDIT2: Here is a script that will search all connected drives dynamically:

@ECHO OFF
SET /P FILENAME=Filename:
FOR %%I IN (A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z) DO (
IF EXIST %%I:\ ECHO Scanning %%I:\
IF EXIST %%I:\ DIR /S /A /B %%I:\%FILENAME%
)
PAUSE

Technical background

What is the command actually doing?

Let's take it apart:

• CMD.EXE: This simply launches CMD.exe, the windows terminal application. In earlier versions (Windows ME and older) it was called command.com and came directly from DOS. CMD.EXE is a DOS prompt but the underlying DOS system (and its limitations) are gone.
• /K: This tells CMD to interpret everything that follows as a command, process it and stay open. /C is similar but closes CMD after processing
• DIR: This is a CMD internal command to list directory contents.
• /S: Tell DIR to also scan subdirectories.
• /A: Tell DIR to also scan hidden and system files and directories.
• /B: Tell DIR to use a simple format with one filename and path per line.
• C:\filename.doc: Tell DIR to search for "filename.doc" and start at C:. You can also use file mask, so if you know your image was named "IMG something", search for C:\IMG*.jpg. Asterisks (*) indicate 0 or more and question marks (?) indicate exactly one char.

OK, so why is this so fast you might ask?

This uses uncached Win32 API calls. These calls have been with Windows for 20 years now and have seen a lot of optimization. When you search for "C:\test.txt", dir will enter a directory and ask windows to give it a list of all files named "test.txt". This yields a very short result of either 1 or 0 entries before DIR moves on to the next directory. The windows search however has to sift through the whole index catalog to find your entry. Also it is more sophisticated. DIR cannot search for file contents.

How to use the displayed results?

Use the mouse to select the path you want and press ENTER or RETURN on the keyboard to copy. If you want to browse to that file, then select only the path without the name and paste it into the Windows explorer address bar. If you want to open the file, open the application that should display it, then open the "open file" dialog and paste the full path with filename into the filename box

Since when is Windows's search something to compare others to, it was always a pile of crap

I can't believe how intermittent the searching is on Windows 10.

As a long-time OSX user I'm finding Windows 10's search to be a lot better. Spotlight is really, really shit.

Windows, OSX...they're both ass.

I hadn't had the issue of typing n characters and seeing what I want, but accidentally typing n+1 characters correctly and it changing to something else entirely until I moved to OSX.

I have no issues searching on Linux, though.

Try everything search. So long as it's for files, not much can beat it.

A sucks

B is just as bad!!!1

Who cares about fairness? Not everything needs to be mac vs pc.

I just use a program called "Everything" by voidtools. It is near instantaneous and finds pretty much everything.

Way better than spotlight or windows search

Ubuntu does exactly the same thing. Where is this coming from? What is the common ancestor?

I'm a huge Alfred fan. It eats 5 Spotlights for breakfast every day.

[deleted]

Just a numbers game, more Windows users to complain.

desperately tries to inject a joke about how no one complains because no one uses it

Really? All I've seen is people bashing on Mac. Must be different parts of Reddit.

OSX has been dead to me since 10.6.8 tbh. 64bit was the only good thing I've felt they've really done, everything else has either slowed my mac, been annoying (no, fuckoff launchpad) or just been an ignorable addition.

Having to switch between OSX and Windows all the time, they're as bad as each other in my opinion.

My issue with OSX is that you can't seem to turn off those update notifications. Apple has permanently destroyed my trust in it since every update seems to slow down my Apple devices. I refuse to update my phone now because I want thing to be usable over the next 3 years, not slow to a crawl. But the damn thing keeps bugging me at the absolute most inopportune times about updating it. The same thing with OSX updates now. I simply refuse to update, even if the update patches a security hole. I can't afford a newer $2500 MacBook every 2 years, so I just don't bother updating.

I love OS X but this is a legitimate complaint I have. It's not a bad trade-off since I can't think of many issues like this.

Apple's design quality has been slowly getting worse, I feel. :(

Spotlight has been shit ever since they gave it that revamp, somewhere around when it became central to the screen rather than the top-right. Buggy as hell, I had a friend who has a Mac Pro (last of the true tower Mac Pros) that he uses for work (hexa-core i7, multiple SSDs, 32gb of RAM, the works). He updated from Snow Leopard to...might've been a few editions after Lion, think it was Yosemite..and spotlight perpetually indexed his drives on boot. Brought his entire computer to it's knees, completely unusuable to the point it was so slow he was barely able to navigate the settings. He had to look up a fix on a different machine. And this was a bug in release software.

There's an option I believe to omit certain sources for spotlight searches. What I would LOVE to see in addition to that is the ability to drag those sources in order of importance for preference.

Right? They dumbed it down and the only thing they added were more excuses for it to give for an operation not working.

One of the few things I liked in OSX. Downloaded the old version soon after I screencapped this actually! I was trying to create a disk partition and be sneaky by not using a seperate drive and put the installer on a little temporary partition. The stupid UI of the new version made specifying exact partition sizes hell, you change one and it changes the size of another or creates another partition. Not to mention the speed and the fact it forced a First Aid on my disk before partitioning- I'd only run First Aid on it manually half an hour before.

The old version was pretty okay, but the current one is just crap.

dll on Mac? Mac uses dylib.

Yeah it's definitely a shit design, since people tend to type complete words rather than partial words. In OP's example, my fingers will naturally just type out "Daisy". I would have to consciously think about typing out just "Dais" instead of the full word.

What's so bad about it? "Apps & features" is Windows 10's replacement for Change or remove a program, they just kept it in for compatibility.

I'm assuming you use the shortcut and not the mouse to open it?

lteer

Maybe the problem is that you misspell it

Google does the same, type 2 words and the first letter of the third and it shows what you want, type another letter? No suggestions at all now.

Seems most search engines just keep getting worse.

My favourite is when you search for a program, but the first result is to fucking "search the web", in Bing no less, but the actually result either showed up halfway through typing or is down in the lower results.

Had mixed results with both tbh. I can only ever get both working somewhat acceptably when searching for programs.

Yeah, it started working again for me too, I put up another screencap in the comments. I did go forwards and back a few times before taking this post's screenshot though, so there was SOME persistency in the bug.