The most amazing file finder ever

So, starting a new job is always interesting. The last couple of months I've been doing nothing except trying to get up to speed on how things are done here at EA DICE. There's a plethora of tools and special solutions for everything. It kind of feels like "whatever you have learned in the past, unlearn it and do it our way". Everything is special made and there are many, many abstraction levels on top of everything. And it is totally awesome! :D

Especially the fact that you are surrounded by so many talented people that knows exactly what they are talking about. I haven't found anything this far that someone in the studio doesn't know how to solve, and that is pretty damn cool.

Anyways, time to write about stuff actually related to the topic...
I happened to watch one of our tech engineers browsing for files on his hard drives and saw him finding the correct files in just a couple of milliseconds. No matter if the file was on his c/d/e/f drive I found myself staring in disbelief when he just wrote a couple of characters in a search field and the program presented him with the possible files in REALTIME. Once I finally got my jaw to start working again I was smart enough to ask about what kind of godly program he was using.

The program that he used is developed by "voidtools" and is called "everything". It works by indexing your harddrives and then presents all these files/folders inside some kind of "ugly window" with a search bar. It's not visually pretty but on the other hand it is pretty darn awesome. Best of all, it is SUPER RESPONSIVE.

I have about 4TB of data and well above 5M files spread over 3 disks and even with that much data I never even notice that it actually has to think, ever, whenever I start typing anything. Instant feedback with the filenames matching your search criteria.

The tool can be found from voidtools download page. It's probably one of the best tools I have ever found.

On a sidenote, if you are actually looking for some specific text string inside files instead of the actual file name, there is a program called Agent Ransack that let's you search for a text string inside all files matching for example *.cpp and presents these in a well thought out way.

Awesome file/folder finder: everything
Awesome text finder inside files: Agent Ransack