> Never in the past decade have I thought to myself, "gawrsh, I wonder where this file is on my laptop hard drive."
I do, but 80% of the time I'm able to locate it by opening the directory where I would put it. And 10% it's in the "other" directory. And since I have the shell history, in the remaining case it is still a simple search.
I search for stuff all the time. But full disk search just never seems to solve the problems I have. Whatever keyword I’m looking for will inevitably show up in thousands of unrelated header files, Python files and JavaScript files in various node_modules directories and whatnot. Search in finder (or spotlight) is always way too noisy to actually do what I want it to do. Spending hours of cpu time to build that a useless index is deeply disrespectful.
The typical find oneliner to do a fulltext search invokes sed. sed supports regular expressions, so you can do quite a bit more than just a simple text match. And you can also invoke various filter chains on the results.
That might be true in theory, but in practice a find oneliner is still the fastest way to find things. It shouldn't be the case, but a fulltext search is faster than using the OS index, because the former is stable and improved for decades by low level developers, while the later is continuously recreated by people who like Javascript in the UI libraries of the OS.
Because the index generator is broken and constantly using up CPU and memory to index things you'll never look for? I mean, it shouldn't be that way, but unfortunately is.
I personally disable these kinds of search indexes in favor of find and ag/ripgrep etc. They are very fast on a modern system with SSD.
Not available to regular folks I guess, but use prewritten aliases to simplify.
